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VENETIAN LIFE. 



^ f'l BY 



W:^D^^O WELLS. 



FOURTH EDITION. 




NEW YOKE: 

PUBLISHED BY KURD AND HOUGHTON, 

459 Broome Street. 

1867. 



:i\Gt^ 



15 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by 

William D. Howells, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts. 



fly TratitfW 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 

STB iEOTTPED AND PRINTED BY 

H. 0. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



ADVEETISEMENT TO THE SECOND EDITION. 



In correcting this book for a second edition, I 
have sought to complete it without altering its orig- 
inal plan: I have given a new chapter sketching 
the history of Venetian Commerce and noticing the 
present trade and industry of Venice ; I have am- 
plified somewhat the chapter on the national holi- 
days, and have affixed an index to the chief historical 
persons, incidents, and places mentioned. 

' Believing that such value as my book may have 
is in fidelity to what I actually saw and knew of 
Venice, I have not attempted to follow specula- 
tively the grand and happy events of last summer 
in their effects upon her life. Indeed, I fancy that 
in the traits at which I loved most to look, the 
life of Venice is not so much changed as her for- 
tunes ; but at any rate I am content to remain 

true to what was fact one year ago. 

W. D. H. 

Cambridge, January 1, 1867. 



CONTENTS. 

CHAP. PAQB 

I. Venice in Venice 9 

11. Arrival and first Days in Venice . . 27 

iri. The Winter in Venice 40 

IV. COMINCIA FAR CaLDO 64 

V. Opera and Theatres 70 

VI. Venetian Dinners and Diners ... 84 

VII. Housekeeping in Venice 94 

VIII. The Balcony on the Grand Canal . . 125 

IX. A Day-Break Ramble 139 

X. The Mouse 146 

XI. Churches and Pictures 154 

XII. Some Islands of the Lagoons . . . 172 

XIII. The Armenians 194 

XIV. The Ghetto and the Jews of Venice . 207 
XV. Some Memorable Places 219 

XVI. Commerce 237 

XVII. Venetian Holidays 258 

XVIII. Christmas Holidays 294 

XIX. Love-making and Marrying; Baptisms and 

Burials 306 

XX. Venetian Traits and Characters . . 328 

XXL Society . . 359 

Index 399 



VENETIAN LIFE. 



CHAPTER L 

VENICE IN VENICE. 



One night at the little theatre in Padua, the 
ticket-seller gave us the stage-box (of which he made 
a great merit), and so we saw the play and the by- 
play. The prompter, as noted from our point of view, 
bore a chief part in the drama (as indeed the prompt- 
er always does in the Italian theatre), and the scene- 
shifters appeared as prominent characters. We could 
not help seeing the virtuous wife, when hotly pur- 
sued by the villain of the piece, pause calmly in the 
wings, before rushing, all tears and desperation, 
upon the stage ; and we were dismayed to behold the 
injured husband and his abandoned foe playfully 
scuffling behind the scenes. All the shabbiness of 
the theatre was perfectly apparent to us ; we saw 
the grossness of the painting and the unreality of 
the properties. And yet I cannot say that the play 
lost one whit of its charm for me, or that the work- 
ing of the machinery and its inevitable clumsiness 
disturbed my enjoyment in the least. There was 



10 VENETIAN LIFE. 

SO much truth and beauty in the playing, that I did 
not care for the sham of the ropes and gilding, and 
presently ceased to take any note of them. The 
illusion which I had thought an essential in the 
dramatic spectacle, turned out to be a condition of 
small importance. 

It has sometimes seemed to me as if fortune had 
given me a stage-box at another and grander spec- 
tacle, and I had been suffered to see this Venice, 
which is to other cities like the pleasant improb- 
ability of the theatre to every-day, commonplace life, 
to much the same effect as that melodrama in Padua. 
I could not, indeed, dwell three years in the place 
without learning to know it differently from those 
writers who have described it in romances, poems, and 
hurried books of travel, nor help seeing from my 
point of observation the sham and cheapness with 
which Venice is usually brought out, if I may so 
speak, in literature. At the same time, it has never 
lost for me its claim upon constant surprise and re- 
gard, nor the fascination of its excellent beauty, its 
peerless picturesqueness, its sole and wondrous grand- 
eur. It is true that the streets in Venice are ca- 
nals ; and yet you can walk to any part of the city, 
and need not take boat whenever you go out of 
doors, as I once fondly thought you must. But 
after all, though I find dry land enough in it, I do 
not find the place less unique, less a mystery, or 
less a charm. By day, the canals are still the main 
thoroughfares ; and if these avenues are not so full 
of light and color as some would have us believe, 



VENICE IN VENICE. 11 

they, at least, do not smell so offensively as others 
pretend. And by night, they are still as dark and 
silent as when the secret vengeance of the Republic 
plunged its victims into the ungossiping depths of the 
Canalazzo ! 

Did the vengeance of the Republic eyer do any 
such thing ? 

Possibly. In Venice one learns not quite to ques- 
tion that reputation for vindictive and gloomy cruelty 
alien historians have given to a government which 
endured so many centuries in the willing obedience 
of its subjects ; but to think that the careful student 
of the old Republican system will condemn it for 
faults far different from those for which it is chiefly 
blamed. At all events, I find it hard to understand 
why, if the Republic was an oligarchy utterly selfish 
and despotic, it has left to all classes of Venetians 
so much regret and sorrow for its fall. 

So, if the reader care to follow me to my stage- 
box, I imagine he will hardly see the curtain rise 
upon just the Venice of his dreams — the Venice of 
Byron, of Rogers, and Cooper ; or upon the Venice 
of his prejudices — the merciless Venice of Daru, 
and of the historians who follow him. But I still 
hope that he will be pleased with the Venice he sees ; 
and will think with me that the place loses little in 
the illusion removed; and — to take leave of our the- 
atrical metaphor — I promise to fatigue him with no 
affairs of my own, except as allusion to them may go 
to illustrate Life in Venice ; and positively he shall 
suffer no annoyance from the fleas and bugs which. 



12 VENETIAN LIFE. 

in Latin countries, so often get from travelers' beds 
into their books. 

Let us mention here at the beginning some of the 
sentimental errors concerning the place, with which 
we need not trouble ourselves hereafter, but which 
no doubt form a large part of every one's associa- 
tions with the name of Venice. Let us take, for ex- 
ample, that pathetic swindle, the Bridge of Sighs. 
There are few, I fancy, who will hear it mentioned 
without connecting its mystery and secrecy with the 
taciturn justice of the Three, or some other cruel 
machinery of the Serenest Republic's policy. When 
I entered it the first time I was at the pains to call 
about me the sad company of those who had passed 
its corridors from imprisonment to death ; and, I 
doubt not, many excellent tourists have done the 
same. I was somewhat ashamed to learn afterward 
that I had, on this occasion, been in very low society, 
and that the melancholy assemblage which I then 
conjured up was composed entirely of honest rogues, 
who might indeed have given as graceful and in- 
genious excuses for being in misfortune as the galley- 
slaves rescued by Don Quixote, — who might even 
have been very picturesque, — but who were not at 
all the material with which a well-regulated imagi- 
nation would deal. The Bridge of Sighs was not 
built till the end of the sixteenth century, and no 
romantic episode of political imprisonment and pun- 
ishment (except that of Antonio Foscarini) occurs 
in Venetian history later than that period. But the 
Bridge of Sighs could have nowise a savor of sen- 



VENICE IN VENICE. 13 

timent from any such episode, being, as it was, merely 
a means of communication between the Criminal 
Courts sitting in the Ducal Palace, and the Criminal 
Prison across the little canal. Housebreakers, cut- 
purse knaves, and murderers do not commonly im- 
part a poetic interest to places which have known 
them ; and yet these are the only sufferers on whose 
Bridge of Sighs the whole sentimental world has 
looked with pathetic sensation ever since Byron 
drew attention to it. The name of the bridge was 
given by the people from that opulence of compassion 
which enables the Italians to pity even rascality in 
difficulties.* 

Political offenders were not confined in the " prison 
on each hand " of the poet, but in the famous pozzi 
(literally, wells) or dungeons under the Ducal Pal- 
ace. And what fables concerning these cells have 
not been uttered and believed ! For my part, I pre- 
pared my coldest chills for their exploration, and I 
am not sure that before I entered their gloom some 

^ The reader will remember that Mr. Ruskin has said in a few 
words, much better than I have said in many, the same thing 
of sentimental errors about Venice : — 

" The Venice of modern fiction and drama is a thing of yester- 
day, a mere efflorescence of decay, a stage-dream, which the first 
ray of daylight must dissipate into dust. No prisoner whose 
name is worth remembering, or whose sorrows deserved sym- 
pathy, ever crossed that Bridge of Sighs, which is the centre of 
the Byronic ideal of Venice ; no great merchant of Venice ever 
saw that Rialto under which the traveler now pauses with breath- 
less interest ; the statue which Byron makes Faliero address as 
one of his great ancestors, was erected to a soldier of fortune a 
hundred and fift^ -years after Faliero's death." — Stones of Venice. 



14 VENETIAN LIFE. 

foolish and lying literature was not shaping itself in 
my mind, to be afterward written out as my Emo- 
tions on looking at them. I do not say now that 
they are calculated to enamor the unimpounded spec- 
tator with prison-life ; but they are certainly far from 
being as bad as I hoped. They are not joyously 
light nor particularly airy, but their occupants could 
have suffered no extreme physical discomfort ; and 
the thick wooden casing of the interior walls evi- 
dences at least the intention of the state to inflict no 
wanton hardships of cold and damp. 

But on whose account had I to be interested in 
the pozzi? It was difficult to learn, unless I took 
the word of sentimental hearsay. I began with Ma- 
rin Falier, but history would not permit the doge to 
languish in these dungeons for a moment. He was 
imprisoned in the apartments of state, and during 
one night only. His fellow-conspirators were hanged 
nearly as fast as taken. 

Failing so signally with Falier, I tried several 
other political prisoners of sad and famous memory 
with scarcely better effect. To a man, they strug- 
gled to shun the illustrious captivity designed them, 
and escaped from the jpozzi by every artifice of fact 
and figure. 

The Carraras of Padua were put to death in the 
city of Venice, and their story is the most pathetic 
and romantic in Venetian history. But it was not 
the cells under the Ducal Palace which witnessed 
their cruel taking-off: they were strangled in the 
prison formerly existing at the top 0"" the palace, 



VENICE IN VENICE. 15 

called the Torresella.* It is possible, however, that 
Jacopo Foscari may have been confined in the pozzi 
at different times about the middle of the fifteenth 
century. With his fate alone, then, can the hor- 
ror of these cells be satisfactorily associated by those 
who relish the dark romance of Venetian annals ; 
for it is not to be expected that the less tragic for- 
tunes of Carlo Zeno and Vittore Pisani, who may 
also have been imprisoned in the pozzi^ can move the 
true sentimentalizer. Certainly, there has been an- 
guish enough in the prisons of the Ducal Palace, 
but we know little of it by name, and cannot con- 
fidently relate it to any great historic presence. 

Touching the Giant's Stairs in the court of the 
palace, the inexorable dates would not permit me to 
rest in the delusion that the head of Marin Falier 
had once bloodily stained them as it rolled to the 
ground — at the end of Lord Byron's tragedy. Nor 
could I keep unimpaired my vision of the Chief of 
the Ten brandishing the sword of justice, as he pro- 
claimed the traitor's death to the people from be- 
tween the two red columns in the southern gallery of 
the palace ; — that facade was not built till nearly a 
century later. 

I suppose, — always judging by my own average 
experience, — that besides these gloomy associations, 
the name of Venice will conjure up scenes of brill- 
iant and wanton gayety, and that in the foreground 
of the brightest picture will be the Carnival of Ven- 
ice, full of antic delight, romantic adventure, and 
^ GallicioUi, Memorie Venete. 



16 VENETIAN LIFE. 

lawless prank. But the carnival, with all the old 
merry-making life of the city, is now utterly obsolete, 
and, in this way, the conventional, masquerading, 
pleasure-loving Venice is become as gross a fiction 
as if, like that other conventional Venice of which I 
have but spoken, it had never existed. There is no 
greater social dullness and sadness, on land or sea, 
than in contemporary Venice. 

The causes of this change lie partly in the altered 
character of the whole world's civilization, partly in 
the increasing poverty of the city, doomed four hun- 
dred years ago to commercial decay, and chiefly (the 
Venetians would be apt to tell you w^hoUy) in the 
implacable anger, the inconsolable discontent, with 
which the people regard their present political con- 
dition. 

If there be more than one opinion among men 
elsewhere concerning the means by which Austria 
acquired Venetia and the tenure by which she holds 
the province, there would certainly seem to be no 
division on the question in Venice. To the stranger 
first inquiring into public feeling, there is something 
almost sublime in the unanimity with which the 
Venetians appear to believe that these means were 
iniquitous, and that this tenure is abominable ; and 
though shrewder study and carefuler observation 
will develop some interested attachment to the 
present government, and some interested opposition 
to it ; though after-knowledge will discover, in the 
hatred of Austria, enough meanness, lukewarmness, 
and selfish ignorance to take off its sublimity, the 



VENICE IN VENICE. 17 

hatred is still found marvelously unanimous and bit- 
ter. I speak advisedly, and with no disposition to 
discuss the question or exaggerate the fact. Exer- 
cising at Venice official functions by permission and 
trust of the Austrian government, I cannot regard 
the cessation of those functions as release from obli- 
gations both to that government and my own, which 
render it improper for me, so long as the Austrians 
remain in Venice, to criticize their rule, or contrib- 
ute, by comment on existing things, to embitter the 
feeling against them elsewhere. I may, nevertheless, 
speak dispassionately of facts of the abnormal social 
and political state of the place ; and I can certainly 
do this, for the present situation is so disagreeable 
in many ways to the stranger forced to live there, — 
the inappeasable hatred of the Austrians by the Ital- 
ians is so illiberal in application to those in any wise 
consorting with them, and so stupid and puerile in 
many respects, that I think the annoyance which it 
gives the foreigner might well damp any passion with 
which he w^as disposed to speak of its cause. 

This hatred of the Austrians dates in its intensity 
from the defeat of patriotic hopes of union with 
Italy in 1859, w^hen Napoleon found the Adriatic at 
Peschiera, and the peace of Villafranca was con- 
cluded. But it is not to be supposed that a feeling 
so general, and so thoroughly interwoven with Vene- 
tian character, is altogether recent. Consigned to 
the Austrians by Napoleon I., confirmed in the sub- 
jection into which she fell a second time after Na- 
poleon's ruin, by the treaties of the Holy Alliance, 



18 VENETIAN LIFE. 

defeated in several attempts to throw off her yoke, 
and loaded with heavier servitude after the fall of 
the short-lived Republic of 1849, — Venice has al- 
ways hated her masters with an exasperation deep- 
ened by each remove from the hope of independence, 
and she now detests them with a rancor which no 
concession short of absolute relinquishment of domin- 
ion would appease. 

Instead, therefore, of finding that public gayety 
and private hospitality in Venice for which the city 
was once famous, the stranger finds himself planted 
between two hostile camps, with merely the choice 
of sides open to him. Neutrality is solitude and 
friendship with neither party ; society is exclusive 
association with the Austrians or with the ItaHans. 
The latter do not spare one of their own number if 
he consorts with their masters, and though a foreigner 
might expect greater allowance, it is seldom shown to 
him|^ To be seen in the company of officers is enmity 
to Venetian freedom, and in the case of Italians it is 
treason to country and to race. Of course, in a city 
where there is a large garrison and a great many 
officers who have nothing else to do, there is inevit- 
ably some international love-making, although the 
Austrian officers are rigidly excluded from association 
with the citizens. But the Italian who marries an 
Austrian severs the dearest ties that bind her to life, 
and remains an exile in the heart of her country. 
Her friends mercilessly cast her off, as they cast off, 
every body who associates with the dominant race. 
In rare cases I have known Italians to receive for- 



VENICE IN VENICE. 19 

eigners who had Austrian friends, but this with the 
exphcit understanding that there was to be no sign 
of recognition if they met them in the company of 
these detested acquaintance. 

There are all degrees of intensity in Venetian 
hatred, and after hearing certain persons pour out 
the gall of bitterness upon the Austrians, you may 
chance to hear these persons spoken of as tepid in 
their patriotism by yet more fiery haters. Yet it 
must not be supposed that the Italians hate the 
Austrians as individuals. On the contrary, they 
have rather a liking for them — rather a contempt- 
uous liking, for they think them somewhat slow and 
dull-witted — and individually the Austrians are ami- 
able people, and try not to give offence. The gov- 
ernment is also very strict in its control of the 
military. I have never seen the slightest affront 
offered by a soldier to a citizen ; and there is evi- 
dently no personal ill-will engendered. The Aus- 
trians are simply hated as the means by which an 
alien and despotic government is imposed upon a 
people beheving themselves born for freedom and 
independence. This hatred, then, is a feeling purely 
political, and there is political machinery by which 
it is kept in a state of perpetual tension. 

The Comitato Veneto is a body of Venetians re- 
siding within the province and abroad, who have 
charge of the Italian interests, and who work in 
every way to promote union with the dominions of 
Victor Emanuel. They live for the most part in 
Venice, where they have a secret press for the pub- 



20 VENETIAN LIFE. 

Hcation of tlieir addresses and proclamations, and 
where they remain unknown to the pohce, upon 
whose spies they maintain an espionage. On every 
occasion of interest, the Committee is sure to make 
its presence felt ; and from time to time persons find 
themselves in the possession of its printed circulars, 
stamped with the Committee's seal ; but no one 
knows how or whence they came. Constant arrests 
of suspected persons are made, but no member of 
the Committee has yet been identified ; and it is said 
that the mysterious body has its agents in every de- 
partment of the government, who keep it informed 
of inimical action. The functions of the Committee 
are multiplied and various. It takes care that on all 
patriotic anniversaries (such as that of the establish- 
ment of the Republic in 1848, and that of the union 
of the Italian States under Victor Emanuel in 1860) 
salutes shall be fired in Venice, and a proper number 
of red, white, and green lights displayed. It in- 
scribes revolutionary sentiments on the walls ; and all 
attempts on the part of the Austrians to revive pop- 
ular festivities are frustrated by the Committee, 
which causes petards to be exploded in the Place of 
St. Mark, and on the different promenades. Even 
the churches are not exempt from these demonstra- 
tions : I was present at the Te Deum performed on 
the Emperor's birthday, in St. Mark's, when the 
moment of elevating the host was signalized by the 
bursting- of a petard in the centre of the cathedral. 
All this, which seems of questionable utility, and 
worse than questionable taste, is approved by the 



VENICE IN VENICE. 21 

fiercer of the Italianissimi, and though possibly the 
strictness of the patriotic disciphne in which the 
members of the Committee keep their fellow-citizens 
may gall some of them, yet any public demonstra- 
tion of content, such as going to the opera, or to the 
Piazza while the Austrian band plays, is promptly 
discontinued at a warning from the Committee. It 
is, of course, the Committee's business to keep the 
world informed of public feeling in Venice, and of 
each new act of Austrian severity. Its members are 
inflexible men, whose ability has been as frequently 
manifested as their patriotism. 

The Venetians are now, therefore, a nation in 
mourning, and have, as I said, disused all their for- 
mer pleasures and merry-makings. Every class, ex- 
cept a small part of the resident titled nobility (a 
great part of the nobility is in either forced or volun-. 
tary exile), seems to be comprehended by this feel- 
ing of despondency and suspense. The poor of the 
city formerly found their respite and diversion in the 
numerous holidays which fell in different parts of the 
year, and which, though religious in their general 
character, were still inseparably bound up in their 
origin with ideas of patriotism and national glory. 
Such of these holidays as related to the victories and 
pride of the Repubhc naturally ended with her fall. 
Many others, however, survived this event in all 
their splendor, but there is not one celebrated now 
as in other days. It is true that the churches still 
parade their pomps in the Piazza on the "day of 
Corpus Christi ; it is true that the bridges of boats 



22 VENETIAN LIFE. 

are still built across the Canalazzo to the church of 
Our Lady of Salvation, and across the Canal of the 
Giudecca to the temple of the Redeemer, on the re- 
spective festivals of these churches ; but the con- 
course is always meagre, and the mirth is forced and 
ghastly. The Italianissimi have so far imbued the 
people with their own ideas and feelings, that the re- 
currence of the famous holidays now merely awakens 
them to lamentations over the past, and vague long- 
ings for the future. 

As for the carnival, which once lasted six months 
of the year, charming hither all the idlers of the 
world by its pecuhar splendor and variety of pleas- 
ure, it does not, as I said, any longer exist. It is 
dead, and its shabby, wretched ghost is a party of 
beggars, hideously dressed out with masks and horns 
and w^omen's habits, who go from shop to shop dron- 
ing forth a stupid song, and levying tribute upon the 
shopkeepers. The crowd through which these mel- 
ancholy jesters pass, regards them with a pensive 
scorn, and goes about its business untempted by the 
delights of carnival. 

All other social amusements have shared in greater 
or less degree the fate of the carnival. At some 
houses conversazioni are still held, and it is impossi- 
ble that balls and parties should not now and then 
be given. But the greater number of the nobles 
and the richer of the professional classes lead for the 
most part a life of listless seclusion, and attempts 
to lighten the general gloom and heaviness in any 
way are not looked upon with favor. By no sort of 



VENICE IN VENICE. 23 

chance are Austrians, or Austriacanti ever invited to 
participate in the pleasures of Venetian society. 

As the social life of Italy, and especially of Ven- 
ice, was in great part to be once enjoyed at the 
theatres, at the cafFe, and at the other places of ]3ub- 
lie resort, so is its absence now to be chiefly noted in 
those places. No lady of perfect standing among 
her people goes to the opera, and the men never go 
in the boxes, but jf they frequent the theatre at all, 
they take places in the pit, in order that the house 
may wear as empty and dispirited a look as possible. 
Occasionally a bomb is exploded in the theatre, as a 
note of reminder, and as means of keeping away such 
of the nobles as are not enemies of the government. 
As it is less easy for the Austrians to participate in 
tlie diversion of comedy, it is a less offence to attend 
the comedy, though even this is not good Italian- 
issimism. In regard to the caffS, there is a per- 
fectly understood system by which the Austrians go 
to one, and the Italians to another ; and Florian's, 
in the Piazza, seems to be the only common ground 
in the city on which the hostile forces consent to 
meet. This is because it is thronged with foreigners 
of all nations, and to go there is not thought a dem- 
onstration of any kind. But the other caffe in the 
Piazza do not enjoy Florian's cosmopolitan immunity, 
and nothing would create more wonder in Venice 
than to see an Austrian officer at the Specchi, unless, 
indeed, it were the presence of a good Italian at the 
Quadri. 

It is in the Piazza that the tacit demonstration of 



24 VENETIAN LIFE. 

hatred and discontent chiefly takes place. Here, 
thrice a week, in winter and summer, the military 
band plays that exquisite music for wdiich the Aus- 
trians are famous. The selections are usually from 
Italian operas, and the attraction is the hardest of all 
others for the music-loving Italian to resist. But he 
does resist it. There are some noble ladies who have 
not entered the Piazza while the band was playing 
there, since the fall of the Republic of 1849 ; and 
none of good standing for patriotism has attended 
the concerts since the treaty of Villafranca in '69. 
Until very lately, the promenaders in the Piazza were 
exclusively foreigners, or else the families of such gov- 
ernment ofScials as were obliged to show^ themselves 
there. Last summer, however, before the Franco- 
Italian convention for the evacuation of Rome re- 
vived the drooping hopes of the Venetians, they had 
begun visibly to falter in their long endurance. But 
this was, after all, only a slight and transient weak- 
ness. As a general thing, now, they pass from the 
Piazza when the music begins, and walk upon the 
long quay at the sea-side of the Ducal Palace ; or if 
they remain in the Piazza they pace up and down 
under the arcades on either side ; for Venetian pa- 
triotism makes a delicate distinction between listen- 
ing to the Austrian band in the Piazza and hearing 
it under the Procuratie, forbidding the first and per- 
mitting the last. As soon as the music ceases the 
Austrians disappear, and the Italians return to the 
Piazza. 

But since the catalomie of demonstrations cannot 



VENICE IN VENICE. 25 

be made full, it need not be made any longer. The 
political feeling in Venice affects her prosperity in a 
far greater degree than may appear to those who do 
not understand how large an income the city for- 
merly derived from making merry. The poor have to 
lament not merely the loss of their holidays, but also 
of the fat employments and bountiful largess which 
these occasions threw into their hands. With the 
exile or the seclusion of the richer families, and the 
reluctance of foreigners to make a residence of the 
gloomy and dejected city, the trade of the shop- 
keepers has fallen off; the larger commerce of the 
place has also languished and dwindled year by year ; 
while the cost of living has constantly increased, and 
heavier burdens of taxation have been laid upon the 
impoverished and despondent people. And in all 
this, Venice is but a type of the whole province of 
Venetia. 

The alien life to be found in the city is scarcely 
worth noting. The Austrians have a casino^ and they 
give balls and parties, and now and then make some 
public manifestation of gayety. But they detest 
Venice as a place of residence, being naturally averse 
to living in the midst of a people who shun them 
like a pestilence. Other foreigners, as I said, are 
obliged to take sides for or against the Venetians, 
and it is amusing enough to find the few English 
residents divided into Austriacanti and Italianissimi.* 

* Austriacanti are people of Austrian politics, though not of 
Austrian birth. Italianissimi are those who favor union with 
Italy at any cost 



26 VENETIAN LIFE. 

Even the consuls of the different nations, who are in 
every way bound to neutrality and indifference, are 
popularly reputed to be of one party or the other ; 
and my predecessor, w^hose unhappy knowledge of 
German threw him on his arrival among people of 
that race, was always regarded as the enemy of 
Venetian freedom, though I believe his principles 
were of the most vivid republican tint in the United 
States. 

The present situation has now endured five years, 
with only slight modifications by time, and only faint 
murmurs from some of the more impatient, that 
bisogna^ una volta o Valtra^ romper il chiodo^ (sooner or 
later the nail must be broken.) As the Venetians are 
a people of indomitable perseverance, long schooled 
to obstinacy by oppression, 1 suppose they will hold 
out till their union with the kingdom of Italy. They 
can do nothing of themselves, but they seem content 
to wait forever in their present gloom. How deeply 
their attitude affects their national character I shall 
inquire hereafter, when I come to look somewhat 
more closely at the spirit of their demonstration. 

For the present, it is certain that the discontent of 
the people has its peculiar effect upon the city as the 
stranger sees its life, casting a glamour over it all, 
making it more and more ghostly and sad, and giving 
it a pathetic charm which I would fain transfer to my 
pages ; but failing that, would pray the reader to 
remember as a fact to which I must be faithful in all 
my descriptions of Venice. 



CHAPTER II. 

ARRI\^L AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE. 

I THINK it does not matter just when I first came 
to Venice. Yesterday and to-day are the same here. 
I arrived one winter morning about five o'clock, and 
was not so full of Soul as I might have been in 
warmer w^eather. Yet I was resolved not to go to 
my hotel in the omnibus (the large, many-seated 
boat so called), but to have a gondola solely for 
myself and my luggage. The porter who seized my 
valise in the station, inferred from some very poly- 
glottic Italian of mine the nature of my wish, and 
ran out and threw that slender piece of luggage into 
a gondola. I followed, lighted to my seat by a 
beggar in picturesque and desultory costume. He 
was one of a class of mendicants whom I came, 
for my sins, to know better in Venice, and whom I 
dare say every traveler recollects, — the merciless 
tribe wdio hold your gondola to shore, and affect to 
do you a service and not a displeasure, and pretend 
not to be abandoned swindlers. The Venetians call 
them gransieri^ or crab-catchers ; but as yet I did 
not know the name or the purpose of this jjoveriiio * 

^ Poverino is the compassionate generic for all unhappy persons 
who work for a living in Venice, as well as many who decline 
to do so. 



28 VENETIAN LIFE. 

at the station, but merely saw that he had the 
Venetian eye for color : in the distribution and 
arrangement of his fragments of dress he had pro- 
duced some miraculous effects of red, and he was 
altogether as infamous a figure as any friend of 
brigands would like to meet in a lonely place. He 
did not offer to stab me and sink my body in the 
Grand Canal, as, in all Venetian keeping, I felt that 
he ought to have done ; but he implored an alms, and 
I hardly know now whether to exult or regret that I 
did not understand him, and left him empty-handed. 
I suppose that he withdrew again the blessings which 
he had advanced me, as we pushed out into the canal ; 
but I heard nothing, for the wonder of the city was 
already upon me. All my nether-spirit, so to speak, 
was dulled and jaded by the long, cold, railway 
journey from Vienna, while every surface-sense was 
taken and tangled in the bewildering brilliancy and 
novelty of Venice. For I think there can be nothing 
else in the world so full of glittering and exquisite 
surprise, as that first glimpse of Venice which the 
traveler catches as he issues ff*om the railway station 
by night, and looks upon her peerless strangeness. 
There is something in the blessed breath of Italy 
(how quickly, coming south, you know it, and how 
bland it is, after the harsh, transalpine air !) which 
prepares you for your nocturnal advent into the 
place ; and O you ! whoever you are, that journey 
toward this enchanted city for the first time, let me 
tell you how happy I count you ! There lies before 
you for your pleasure, the spectacle of such singular 



ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE. 29 

beauty as no picture can ever show you nor book tell 
you, — beauty which you shall feel perfectly but 
once, and regret forever. 

For my own part, as the gondola slipped away 
from the blaze and bustle of the station down the 
gloom and silence of the broad canal, I forgot that I 
had been freezing two days and nights ; that I was at 
that moment very cold and a little homesick. I 
could at first feel nothing but that beautiful silence, 
broken only by the star-silvered dip of the oars. 
Then oh either hand I saw stately palaces rise gray 
and lofty from the dark waters, holding here and 
there a lamp against their faces, which brought bal- 
conies, and columns, and carven arches into moment- 
ary relief, and threw long streams of crimson into 
the canal. I could see by that uncertain glimmer 
how fair was all, but not how sad and old ; and so, 
unhaun ted by any pang for the decay that afterward 
saddened me amid the forlorn beauty of Venice, I 
glided on. I have no doubt it was a proper time 
to think all the fantastic things in the world, and I 
thought them ; but they passed vaguely through my 
mind, without at all interrupting the sensations of 
sight and sound. Indeed, the past and present mixed 
there, and the moral and material were blent in the 
sentiment of utter novelty and surprise. The quick 
boat slid through old troubles of mine, and unlooked^ 
for events gave it the impulse that carried it beyond, 
and safely around sharp corners of life. And all the 
while I knew that this was a progress through narrow 
and crooked canals, and past marble angles of palaces. 



30 VENETIAN LIFE. 

But I did not know then that this fine confusion 
of sense and spirit was the first faint impression of 
the charm of Kfe in Venice. 

Dark, funereal barges Hke my own had flitted by, 
and the gondoHers had warned each other at every 
turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries ; the lines of 
balconied palaces had never ended ; — here and there 
at their doors larger craft were moored, with dim 
figures of men moving uncertainly about on them. 
At last we had passed abruptly out of the Grand 
Canal into one of the smaller channels, and from 
comparative light into a darkness only remotely 
affected by some far-streaming corner lamp. But 
always the pallid, stately palaces ; always the dark 
heaven wdth its trembling stars above, and the dark 
water with its trembling stars below ; but now in- 
numerable bridges, and an utter lonesomeness, and 
ceaseless sudden turns and windings. One could 
not resist a vague feeling of anxiety, in these strait 
and solitary passages, which was part of the strange 
enjoyment of the time, and which was referable to 
the novelty, the hush, the darkness, and the piratical 
appearance and unaccountable pauses of the gon- 
doliers. Was not this Venice, and is not Venice for- 
ever associated w^ith bravoes and unexpected dagger- 
thrusts ? That valise of mine might represent fabu- 
lous wealth to the uncultivated imagination. Who, 
if I made an outcry, could understand the Facts of the 
Situation — (as we say in the journals) ? To move 
on was relief; to pause was regret for past trans- 
gressions mingled with good resolutions for the future. 



ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE. 31 

But I felt the liveliest mixture of all these emotions, 
when, slipping from the cover of a bridge, the gon- 
dola suddenly rested at the foot of a stairway before 
a closely-barred door. The gondoliers rang and 
rang again, while their passenger 

" Divided the swift mind," 

in the wonder whether a door so grimly bolted and 
austerely barred could possibly open into a hotel, 
wuth cheerful overcharges for candles and service. 
But as soon as the door opened, and he beheld the 
honest swindling countenance of a hotel portier^ he 
felt secure against every thing but imposture, and all 
wild absurdities of doubt and conjecture at once 
faded from his thought, when the portier suffered the 
gondoliers to make him pay a florin too much. 

So, I had arrived in Venice, and I had felt the 
influence of that complex spell which she lays upon 
the stranger. I had caught the most alluring glimpses 
of the beauty which cannot wholly perish while any 
fragment of her sculptured w^alls nods to its shadow 
in the canal ; I had been penetrated by a deep sense 
of the mystery of the place, and I had been touched 
already by the anomaly of modern life amid scenes 
where its presence offers, according to the humor 
in which it is studied, constant occasion for annoy- 
ance or delight, enthusiasm or sadness. 

I fancy that the ignorant impressions of the earlier 
days after my arrival need scarcely be set down even 
in this perishable record ; but I w^ould not wholly 
forget how, though isolated from all acquaintance 



32 VENETIAN LIFE. 

and alien to the place, I yet felt curiously at home 
in Venice from the first. I believe it was be- 
cause I had, after my own fashion, loved the beauti- 
ful that I here found the beautiful, where it is su- 
preme, full of society and friendship, speaking a 
language which, even in its unfamiliar forms, I could 
partly understand, and at once making me citizen of 
that Venice from which I shall never be exiled. It 
was not in the presence of the great and famous 
monuments of art alone that I felt at home — in- 
deed, I could as yet understand their excellence and 
grandeur only very imperfectly — but wherever I 
wandered through the quaint and marvelous city, I 
found the good company of 

" The fair, the old ; " 

and to tell the truth, I think it is the best society in 
Venice, and I learned to turn to it later from other 
companionship with a kind of relief. 

My first rambles, moreover, had a peculiar charm 
which knowledge of locality has since taken away. 
They began commonly with some purpose or des- 
tination, and ended by losing me in the intricacies 
of the narrowest, crookedest, and most inconsequent 
little streets in the world, or left me cast-away upon 
the unfamiliar waters of some canal as far as possible 
from the point aimed at. Dark and secret little 
courts lay in wait for my blundering steps, and I was 
incessantly surprised and brought to surrender by 
paths that beguiled me up to dead walls, or the sud- 
den brinks of canals. The wide and open squares 



ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE. 33 

before the innumerable churches of the city were 
equally victorious, and continually took me prisoner. 
But all places had something rare and worthy to be 
seen : if not loveliness of sculpture or architecture, 
at least interesting squalor and picturesque wretch- 
edness ; and I believe I had less dehght in proper 
Objects of Interest than m the dirty neighborhoods 
that reeked with unwholesome winter damps below, 
and peered curiously out with frowzy heads and 
beautiful eyes from the high, heavy-shuttered case- 
ments above. Every court had its carven w^ell to 
show me, in the noisy keeping of the water-carriers 
and the slatternly, statuesque gossips of the place. 
The remote and noisome canals were pathetic with 
empty old palaces peopled by herds of poor, that 
decorated the sculptured balconies with the tatters 
of epicene linen, and patched the lofty windows with 
obsolete hats. 

I found the night as full of beauty as the day, 
when caprice led me from the brilliancy of St. Mark's 
and the glittering streets of shops that branch away 
from the Piazza, and lost me in the quaint recesses 
of the courts, or the tangles of the distant alleys, 
where the dull little oil-lamps vied with the tapers 
burning before the street-corner shrines of the Vir- 
gin,* in making the way obscure, and deepening the 
shadows about the doorways and under the frequent 
arches. I remember distinctly among the beautiful 
nights of that time, the soft night of late winter 

=^ In the early times these tapers were the sole means of street 
illumination in Venice. 
3 



34 VENETIAN LIFE. 

which first showed me the scene you may behold 
from the PubHc Gardens at the end of the long con- 
cave line of the Riva degli Schiavoni. Lounging there 
upon the southern parapet of the Gardens, I turned 
from the dim bell-towers of the evanescent islands 
in the east (a solitary gondola gliding across the 
calm of the water, and striking its moonlight silver 
into multitudinous ripples), and glanced athwart the 
vague shipping in the basin of St. Mark, and saw all 
the lights from the Piazzetta to the Giudecca, mak- 
ing a crescent of flame in the air, and casting deep 
into the water under them a crimson glory that sank 
also down and down in my own heart, and illumined 
all its memories of beauty and delight. Behind these 
lamps rose the shadowy masses of church and pal- 
ace ; the moon stood bright and full in the heavens , 
the gondola drifted away to the northward ; the isl- 
ands of the lagoons seemed to rise and sink with 
the light palpitations of the waves like pictures on 
the undulating fields of banners ; the stark rigging 
of a ship showed black against the sky ; the Lido 
sank from sight upon the east, as if the shore had 
composed itself to sleep by the side of its beloved 
sea to the music of the surge that gently beat its 
sands ; the yet leafless boughs of the trees above 
me stirred themselves together, and out of one of 
those trembling towers in the lagoons, one rich, full 
sob burst from the heart of a bell, too deeply stricken 
with the glory of the scene, and suffused the languid 
night with the murmur of luxurious, ineffable sadness. 
But there is a perfect democracy in the realm of 



ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE. 35 

the beautiful, and whatsoever pleases is equal to 
any other thing there, no matter how low its origin 
or humble its composition ; and the magnificence of 
that moonlight scene gave me no deeper joy than I 
won from the fine spectacle of an old man whom I 
saw burning cofffee one night in the little court 
behind my lodgings, and whom I recollect now as 
one of the most interesting people I saw in my first 
days at Venice. All day long the air of that neigh- 
bourhood had reeked with the odors of the fragrant 
berry, and all day long this patient old man — sage, 
let me call him — had turned the sheet-iron cylinder 
in which it was roasting over an open fire after the 
picturesque fashion of roasting coffee in Venice. 
Now that the night had fallen, and the stars shone 
down upon him, and the red of the flame luridly il- 
lumined him, he showed more grand and venerable 
than ever. Simple, abstract humanity, has its own 
grandeur in Italy ; and it is not hard here for the 
artist to find the primitive types with which genius 
loves best to deal. As for this old man, he had the 
beard of a saint, and the dignity of a senator, har- 
monized with the squalor of a beggar, superior to 
which shone his abstract, unconscious grandeur of 
humanity. A vast and calm melancholy, which had 
nothing to do with burning coffee, dwelt in his aspect 
and attitude ; and if he had been some dread super- 
natural agency, turning the wheel of fortune, and 
doing men, instead of coffee, brown, he could not 
have looked more sadly and weirdly impressive. 
When, presently, he rose from his seat, and lifted the 



36 VENETIAN LIFE. 

cylinder from its place, and the clinging flames leaped 
after it, and he shook it, and a volume of luminous 
smoke enveloped him and glorified him — then I felt 
with secret anguish that he was beyond art, and 
turned sadly from the spectacle of that sublime and 
hopeless magnificence. 

At other times (but this was in broad daylight) I 
was troubled by the aesthetic perfection of a certain 
ruffian boy, who sold cakes of baked Indian-meal to 
the soldiers in the military station near the Piazza, 
and whom I often noted from the windows of the 
little caffe there, where you get an excellent caffe 
bianco (coflfee with milk) for ten soldi and one to 
the waiter. I have reason to fear that this boy 
dealt over shrewdly with the Austrians, for a pitiless 
war rao;ed between him and one of the sero;eants. 
His hair was dark, his cheek was of a bronze better 
than olive ; and he wore a brave cap of red flannel, 
drawn down to eyes of lustrous black. For the rest, 
he gave unity and coherence to a jacket and pan- 
taloons of heterogeneous elements, and, such was the 
elasticity of his spirit, a buoyant grace to feet en- 
cased in Avooden shoes. Habitually came a barrel- 
organist, and ground before the barracks, and 

" Took the soul . , 

Of that waste place with joy j " fe 

and ever, when this organist came to a certain lively 
waltz, and threw his whole soul, as it were, into the 
crank of his instrument, my beloved ragamuffin failed 
not to seize another cake-boy in his arms, and thus 
embraced, to whirl through a wild inspiration of 



ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE. 37 

figures, in which there was something grotesquely 
rhythmic, something of indescribable barbaric mag- 
nificence, spirituahzed into a grace of movement su- 
perior to the energy of the North and the extravagant 
fervor of the East. It was coffee and not wine 
that I drank, but I fable all the same that I saw 
reflected in this superb and artistic superation of the 
difficulties of dancing in that unfriendly foot-gear, 
something of the same genius that combated and 
vanquished the elements, to build its home upon sea- 
washed sands in marble structures of airy and stately 
splendor, and gave to architecture new glories full of 
eternal surprise. ' 

So, I say, I grew early into sympathy and friend- 
ship with Venice, and being newly from a land where 
every thing, morally and materially, was in good 
repair, I rioted sentimentally on the picturesque ruin, 
the pleasant discomfort and hopelessness of every 
thing about me here. It w^as not yet the season to 
behold all the delight of the lazy, out-door life of the 
place ; but nevertheless I could not help seeing that 
great part of the people, both rich and poor, seemed 
to have nothing to do, and that nobody seemed to be 
driven by any inward or outward impulse. When, 
however, I ceased (as I must in time) to be merely 
a spectator of this idleness, and learned that I too 
must assume mv share of the common indolence, 1 
found it a grievous burden. Old habits of work, old 
habits of hope, made my endless leisure irksome to 
me, and almost intolerable when I ascertained fairly 
and finally that in my desire to fulfill long-cherished 



38 VENETIAN LIFE. ' 

but, after all, merely general designs of literary study, 
I had forsaken wholesome struggle in the currents 
where I felt the motion of the age, only to drift 
into a lifeless eddy of the world, remote from in- 
centive and sensation. 

For such is Venice, and the will must be strong 
and the faith indomitable in him who can long retain, 
amid the influences of her stagnant quiet, a practical 
belief in God's purpose of a great moving, anxious, 
toiling, aspiring world outside. When you have 
yielded, as after a while I yielded, to these influences, 
a gentle incredulity possesses you, and if you consent 
that such a thing is as earnest and useful life, you 
cannot help wondering why it need be. The charm 
of the place sweetens your temper, but corrupts you ; 
and I found it a sad condition of my perception of 
the beauty of Venice and friendship with it, that I 
came in some unconscious way to regard her fate as 
my own ; and when I began to write the sketches 
which go to form this book, it was as hard to speak 
of any ugliness in her, or of the doom written 
against her in the hieroglyphic seams and fissures of 
her crumbling masonry, as if the fault and penalty 
were mine. I do not so greatly blame, therefore, the 
writers who have committed so many sins of omission 
concerning her, and made her all light, color, canals, 
and palaces. One's conscience, more or less uncom- 
fortably vigilant elsewhere, drowses here, and it is 
difficult to remember that fact is more virtuous than 
fiction. In otlier years, when there was life in the 
city, and this sad ebb of prosperity was full tide in 



ARRIVAL AND FIRST DAYS IN VENICE. 39 

her canals, there might have been some incentive to 
keep one's thoughts and words from lapsing into 
habits of luxurious dishonesty, some reason for telling 
the whole hard truth of things, some policy to serve, 
some end to gain. But now, what matter ? 



CHAPTER III. 

THE WINTER IN VENICE. 

It was winter, as I said, when I first came to 
Venice, and my experiences of the city were not all 
purely aesthetic. There was, indeed, an every-day 
roughness and discomfort in the weather, which 
travelers passing their first winter in Italy find it 
hard to reconcile with the habitual ideas of the sea- 
son's clemency in the South. But winter is apt to 
be very severe in mild climates. People do not ac- 
knowledge it, making a w^retched pretense that it is 
summer only a little out of humor. 

The Germans have introduced stoves at Venice, 
but they are not in much favor with the Italians, 
who think their heat unwholesome, and endure a 
degree of cold, in their wish to dispense with fire, 
wdiich we of the winter-lands know nothing of in our 
houses. They pay for their absurd prejudice with 
terrible chilblains ; and their hands, which suffer 
equally w^ith their feet, are, in the case of those 
most exposed to the cold, objects pitiable and revolt- 
ing to behold when the itching and the effort to allay 
it has turned them into bloated masses of sores. It 
is not a pleasant thing to speak of; and the constant 
sight of the affliction among people who bring you 



THE WINTER IN VENICE. 41 

bread, cut you cheese, and weigh you out sugar, by 
no means reconciles the Northern stomach to its prev- 
alence. I have observed that priests, and those 
who have much to do in the frigid churches, are the 
worst sufferers in this way ; and I think no one can 
help noting in the harsh, raw winter - complexion 
(for in summer the tone is quite different) of the 
women of all classes, the protest of systems cruelly 
stm^ed of the warmth which health demands. 

The houses are, naturally enough in this climate, 
where there are eight months of summer in the year, 
all built with a view to coolness in summer, and the 
rooms which are not upon the ground-floor are very 
large, lofty, and cold. In the palaces, indeed, there 
are two suites of apartments — the smaller and 
cozier suite upon the first floor for the winter, and 
the grander and airier chambers and saloons above, 
for defence against the insidious heats of the sirocco. 
But, for the most part, people must occupy the same 
room summer and winter, the sole change beino; in 
the strip of carpet laid meagrely before the sofa 
during the latter season. In the comparatively few 
houses where carpets are the rule and not the ex- 
ception, they are always removed during the summer 
— for the triple purpose of sparing them some 
months' wear, banishing fleas and other domestic in- 
sects, and showing off the beauty of the oiled and 
shining pavement, which in the meanest houses is 
tasteful, and in many of the better sort is often in- 
wrouP:ht with fio;ures and desi^s of mosaic work. 
All the floors in Venice are of stone, and whether 



4:2 VENETIAN LIFE. 

of marble flags, or of that species of composition 
formed of dark cement, with fragments of colored 
marble imbedded and smoothed and polished to the 
most glassy and even surface, and the general effect 
and complexion of petrified plum-pudding, all the 
floors are death-cold in winter. People sit with 
their feet upon cushions, and their bodies muffled ir. 
furs and wadded gowns. When one goes out into 
the sun, one often finds an overcoat too heavy, but 
it never gives warmth enough in the house, where 
the Venetian sometimes wears it. Indeed, the sun 
is recognized by Venetians as the only legitimate 
source of heat, and they sell his favor at fabulous 
prices to such foreigners as take the lodgings into 
which he shines. 

It is those who remain in-doors, therefore, who are 
exposed to the utmost rigor of the winter, and people 
spend as much of their time as possible in the open 
air. The Riva degli Schiavoni catches the warm 
afternoon sun in its w^hole extent, and is then 
thronged with promenaders of every class, condition, 
age, and sex ; and whenever the sun shines in the 
Piazza, shivering fashion eagerly courts its favor. 
At night men crowd the close little caff^, where 
they reciprocate smoke, respiration, and animal heat, 
and thus temper the inclemency of the weather, and 
beguile the time with solemn loafing,^ and the pe- 
rusal of dingy little journals, drinking small cups 

^ I permit myself, throughout this book, the use of the express- 
ive American words loaf and loafer, as tlie only terms adequate to 
the description of professional idling in Venice. 



THE WINTER IN VENICE. 43 

of black coffee, and playing long games of chess, — 
an evening that seemed to me as torpid and life- 
less as a Lap's, and intolerable when I remembered 
the bright, social winter evenings of another and 
happier land and civilization. 

Sometimes you find a heated stove — that is to 
say, one in which there has been a fire during the 
day — in a Venetian house ; but the stove seems 
usually to be placed in the room for ornament, or 
else to be engaged only in diffusing a very acrid 
smoke, — as if the Venetian preferred to take 
warmth, as other people do snuff, by inhalation. The 
stove itself is -a curious structure, and built com^ 
monly of bricks and plastering, — whitewashed and 
painted outside. It is a great consumer of fuel, and 
radiates but little heat. By dint of constant wood- 
ing I contrived to warm mine; but my Italian 
friends always avoided its vicinity when they came 
to see me, and most amusingly regarded my deter- 
mination to be comfortable as part of the eccentricity 
inseparable from the Anglo-Saxon character. 

I daresay they w^ould not trifle with winter thus, 
if they knew him in his northern moods. But the 
only voluntary concession they make to his severity 
is the scaldino^ and this is made chiefly by the yield- 
ing sex, who are denied the warmth of the caffe. 
The use of the scaldino is known to all ranks, but 
it is the women of the poorer orders who are most 
addicted to it. The scaldino is a small pot of glazed 
earthen-ware, having an earthen bale : and with 
this handle passed over the arm, and the pot full of 



44 VENETIAN LIFE. 

bristling charcoal, the Veneziana's defense against 
cold is complete. She carries her scaldino with her 
in the house from room to room, and takes it with 
her into the street ; and it has often been my for- 
tune in the churches to divide my admiration be- 
tween the painting over the altar and the poor old 
crone kneehng before it, who, while she sniffed and 
whispered a gelid prayer, and warmed her heart 
with religion, baked her dirty palms m the carbonic 
fumes of the scaldino. In one of the public bath- 
houses in Venice there are four prints upon the walls, 
intended to convey to the minds of the bathers a 
poetical idea of the four seasons. There is nothing 
remarkable in the symbolization of Spring, Summer, 
and Autumn ; but Winter is nationally represented 
by a fine lady dressed in furred robes, with her feet 
upon a cushioned foot-stool, and a scaldino in her 
lap ! When we talk of being invaded in the north, 
we poetize the idea of defense by the figure of de- 
fending our hearthstones. Alas ! could we fight for 
our sacred sealdini ? 

Happy are the men who bake chestnuts, and sell 
hot pumpkins and pears, for they can unite pleasure 
and profit. There are some degrees of poverty be- 
low the standard of the scaldino, and the beggars 
and the wretcheder poor keep themselves warm, I 
think, by sultry recollections of summer, as Don 
Quixote proposed to subsist upon savory remem- 
brances, during one of his periods of fast. One 
mendicant whom I know, and who always sits upon 
the steps of a certain bridge, succeeds, I believe, as 



THE WINTER IN VENICE. 45 

the season advances, in heating the marble beneath 
him bv firm and unswervino; adhesion, and estab- 
lishes a reciprocity of warmth with it. I have no 
reason to suppose that he ever deserts his seat for a 
moment during the whole winter ; and indeed, it 
would be a vicious waste of comfort to do so. 

In the winter, the whole city sniffs^ and if the 
Pipchin theory of the effect of sniffing upon the 
eternal interests of the soul be true, few people go 
to heaven from Venice. I sometimes wildly won- 
dered if Desdemona, in her time, sniffed, and found 
little comfort in the reflection that Shylock must 
have had a cold in his head. There is comparative 
warmth in the broad squares before the churches, 
but the narrow streets are bitter thorough-draughts, 
and fell influenza lies in wait for its prey in all those 
picturesque, seducing little courts of which I have 
spoken. 

It is, however, in the churches, whose cool twi- 
light and airy height one finds so grateful in summer, 
that the sharpest malice of the winter is felt ; and 
having visited a score of them soon after my arrival, 
I deferred the remaining seventy-five or eighty, to- 
gether with the gallery of the Academy, until ad- 
vancing spring should, in some degree, have miti- 
gated the severity of their temperature. As far as 
my imagination affected me, I thought the Gothic 
churches much more tolerable than the temples of 
Renaissance art. The empty bareness of these, with 
their huge marbles, and their soulless splendors of 
theatrical sculpture, their frescoed roofs and broken 



46 VENETIAN LIFE. 

arches, was insufferable. The arid grace of Palla- 
dlo's architecture was especially grievous to the 
sense in cold w^eather ; and I warn the traveler who 
goes to see the lovely Madonnas of Bellini to beware 
how he trusts himself in w^inter to the gusty, arctic 
magnificence of the church of the Redentore. But 
b}^ all means the coldest church in the city is that of 
the Jesuits, which those who have seen it will re- 
member for its famous marble drapery. This base, 
mechanical surprise (for it is a trick and not art) is 
effected by inlaying the white marble of columns 
and pulpits and altars with a certain pattern of verd- 
antique. The workmanship is marvelously skillful, 
and the material costly, but it only gives the church 
the effect of being draped in damask linen ; and 
even where the marble is carven in vast and heavy 
folds over a pulpit to simulate a curtain, or w^rought 
in figures on the steps of the high-altar to represent 
a carpet, it has no richness of effect, but a poverty, a 
coldness, a harshness indescribably table-clothy. I 
think all this has tended to chill the soul of the sa- 
cristan, who is the feeblest and thinnest sacristan 
conceivable, with a frost of white hair on his tem- 
ples quite incapable of thawing. In this dreary 
sanctuary is one of Titian's great paintings, The 
Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, to w^hich (though it is 
30 cunningly disposed as to light that no one ever 
yet saw the whole picture at once) you turn invol- 
untarily, envious of the Saint toasting so comfortably 
on his gridiron amid all that frigidity. 

The Venetians pretend that many of the late win- 



THE WINTER IN VENICE. 47 

ters have been much severer than those of former 
years, but I think this pretense has less support in 
fact than in the custom of mankind everywhere, to 
claim that such weather as the present, whatever it 
happens to be, was never seen before. In fine, the 
winter climate of north Italy is really veiy harsh, and 
though the season is not so severe in Venice as in 
Milan, or even Florence, it is still so sharp as to make 
foreigners regret the generous fires and warmly-built 
houses of the north. There was snow but once 
during my first Venetian winter, 1861-62 ; the sec- 
ond there was none at all ; but the third, which was 
last winter, it fell repeatedly to considerable depth, 
and lay unmelted for many weeks in the shade. 
The lagoons were frozen for miles in every direction ; 
and under our windows on the Grand Canal, great 
sheets of ice went up and down with the rising and 
the falling tide for nearly a whole month. The vis- 
ible misery throughout the fireless city was great ; 
and it was a problem I never could solve, whether 
people in-doors were greater sufferers from the cold 
than those who weathered the cruel winds sweeping 
the squares and the canals, and whistling through the 
streets of stone and brine. The boys had an unwonted 
season of sliding on the frozen lagoons, though a good 
deal persecuted by the- police,^ who must have looked 
upon such a tremendous innovation as little better 
than revolution ; and it was said that there were 
card-parties on the ice ; but the only creatures which 
seemed really to enjoy the weather were the sea- 
gulls. These birds, which flock into the city in vast 



48 VENETIAN LIFE. 

numbers at the first approach of cold, and, sailing 
up and down the canals between the palaces, bring 
to the dwellers in the city a full sense of mid-ocean 
forlornness and desolation, now rioted on the savage 
winds, with harsh cries, and danced upon the waves 
of the bitter brine, with a clamorous joy that had 
something eldritch and unearthly in it. 

A place so much given to gossip as Venice did not 
fail to produce many memorable incidents of the 
cold ; but the most singular adventure was that of 
the old man employed at the Armenian Convent to 
bring milk from the island of San Lazzaro to the city. 
One night, shortly after the coldest weather set in, 
he lost his oar as he was returning to the island. 
The wind, which is particularly furious in that part 
of the lagoon, blew his boat away into the night, 
and the good brothers at the convent naturally gave 
up their milkman for lost. The winds and waters 
drifted him eight miles from the city into the north- 
ern lagoon, and there lodged his boat in the marshes, 
where it froze fast in the stiffening mud. The luck- 
less occupant had nothing to eat or drink in his boat, 
where he remained five days and nights, exposed to 
the inclemency of cold many degrees below friend- 
ship in severity. He made continual signs of dis- 
tress, but no boat came near enough to discover him. 
At last, when the whole marsh was frozen solid, he 
was taken off by some fishermen, and carried to the 
convent, where he remains in perfectly recovered 
health, and where no doubt he will be preserved alive 
many years in an atmosphere which renders dying at 



THE WINTER IN VENICE. 49 

San Lazzaro a matter of no small difficulty. During 
the whole time of his imprisonment, he sustained life 
against hunger and cold by smoking. I suppose no 
one will be surprised to learn that he was rescued 
by the fishermen through the miraculous interposi- 
tion of the Madonna — as any one might have seen 
by the votive picture hung up at her shrine on a 
bridge of the Riva degli Schiavoni, wherein the Vir- 
gin was represented breaking through the clouds in 
one corner of the sky, and unmistakably directing 
the operations of the fishermen. 

It is said that no such winter as that of 1863-4 
has been known in Venice since the famous Anno del 
GfMaccio (Year of the Ice), which fell about the 
beginning of the last century. This year is cele- 
brated in the local literature ; the play which com- 
memorates it always draws full houses at the people's 
theatre, Malibran ; and the often-copied picture, by 
a painter of the time, representing Lustrissime and 
Lustrissimi in hoops and bag-wigs on the ice, never 
fails to block up the street before the shop-window 
in which it is exposed. The King of Denmark was 
then the guest of the Republic, and as the unprece- 
dented cold defeated all the plans arranged for his 
diversion, the pleasure-loving government turned the 
cold itself to account, and made the ice occasion of 
novel brilliancy in its festivities. The duties on com- 
merce between the city and the mainland were sus- 
pended for as long time as the lagoon should remain 
frozen, and the ice became a scene of the liveliest 
traffic, and was everywhere covered with sledges, 
4 



60 VENETIAN LIFE. 

bringing the produce of the country to the capital, 
and carrymg away its stuffs in return. The Vene- 
tians of every class amused themselves in visiting 
this free mart, and the gentler and more delicate sex 
pressed eagerly forward to traverse with their feet a 
space hitherto passable only in gondolas.* The la- 
goon remained frozen, and these pleasures lasted 
eighteen days, a period of cold unequaled till last 
winter. A popular song now declares that the pres- 
ent generation has known a winter quite as marvel- 
ous as that of the Year of the Ice, and celebrates 
the wonder of walking on the water : — 

Che beir affar ! 
Che patetico affar ! 
Che immenso affar ! 
Sora I'acqua eamminar ! 

But after all the disagreeable winter, w^hich hardly 
commences before Christmas, and which ends about 
the middle of March, is but a small part of the 
glorious Venetian year ; and even this ungracious 
season has a loveliness, at times, which it can have 
nowhere but in Venice. What summer-delight of 
other lands could match the beauty of the first Vene- 
tian snow-fall which I saw ? It had snowed over- 
night, and in the morning when I woke it was still 
snowing. The flakes fell softly and vertically through 
the motionless air, and all the senses were full of 
languor and repose. It was rapture to lie still, and 
after a faint glimpse of the golden-winged angel on 
the bell-tower of St. Mark's, to give indolent eyes 
^ Origine delle Feste Veneziane, di Giustina Renier-Michiel. 



THE WINTER IN VENICE. 51 

solely to the contemplation of the roof opposite, 
where the snow lay half an inch deep upon the 
brown tiles. The little scene — a few square yards 
of roof, a chimney-pot, and a dormer-window — was 
all that the most covetous spirit could demand ; and 
I lazily lorded it over that domain of pleasure, while 
the lingering mists of a dream of new-world events 
blent themselves with the luxurious humor of the 
moment and the calm of the snow-fall, and made my 
reverie one of the perfectest things in the world. 
When I was lost the deepest in it, I was inexpressi- 
bly touched and gratified by the appearance of a 
black cat at the dormer-window. In Venice, roofs 
commanding pleasant exposures seem to be chiefly 
devoted to the cultivation of this animal, and there 
are many cats in Venice. My black cat looked 
wonderingly upon the snow for a moment, and then 
ran across the roof. Nothing could have been better. 
Any creature less silent, or in point of movement 
less soothing to the eye than a cat, would have been 
torture of the spirit. As it was, this little piece of 
action contented me so well, that I left every thing 
else out of my reverie, and could only think how 
deliciously the cat harmonized with the snow-covered 
tiles, the chimney-pot, and the dormer-window. I 
began to long for her reappearance, but when she 
did come forth and repeat her maneuver, I ceased 
to have the slightest interest in the matter, and ex- 
perienced only the disgust of satiety. I had felt 
ennui — nothing remained but to get up and change 
my relations with the world. 



62 VENETIAN LIFE. 

In Venetian streets they give the fallen snow no 
rest. It is at once shoveled into the canals by hun- 
dreds of haK-nsiked faccMni ; * and now in St. Mark's 
Place the music of innumerable shovels smote upon 
my ear ; and I saw the shivering legion of poverty 
as it engaged the elements in a struggle for the pos- 
session of the Piazza. But the snow continued to 
fall, and through the twihght of the descending 
flakes all this toil and encounter looked like that 
weary kind of effort in dreams, when the most de- 
termined industry seems only to renew the task. 
The lofty crest of the bell-tower was hidden in the 
folds of falling snow, and I could no longer see the 
golden angel upon its summit. But looked at across 
the Piazza, the beautiful outline of St. Mark's Church 
was perfectly penciled in the air, and the shifting 
threads of the snow-fall were woven into a spell of 
novel enchantment around a structure that always 
seemed to me too exquisite in its fantastic loveliness 
to be any thing but the creation of magic. The ten- 
der snow had compassionated the beautiful edifice for 
all the wrongs of time, and so hid the stains and ug- 
liness of decay that it looked as if just from the hand 
of the builder — or, better said, just from the brain 
of the architect. There was marvelous freshness 
in the colors of the mosaics in the great arches of 
the fa9ade, and all that gracious harmony into which 
the temple rises, of marble scrolls and leafy exuber- 

^ The term for those idle people in Italian cities who relieve long 
seasons of repose by occasionally acting as messengers, porters, 
and day-laborers. 



THE WINTER IN VENICE. 53 

ance airily supporting the statues of the saints, was 
a hundred times ethereahzed by the purity and 
whiteness of the drifting flakes. The snow lay 
lightly on the golden globes that tremble like pea- 
cock-crests above the vast domes, and plumed them 
with softest white ; it robed the saints in ermine ; 
and it danced over all its work, as if exulting in its 
beauty — beauty which filled me with subtle, selfish 
yearning to keep such evanescent loveliness for the 
little-while-longer of my whole life, and with despair 
to think that even the poor lifeless shadow of it could 
never be fairly reflected in picture or poem. 

Through the wavering snow-fall, the Saint Theo- 
dore upon one of the granite pillars of the Piazzetta 
did not show so grim as his wont is, and the winged 
lion on the other might have been a winged lamb, so 
mild and gentle he looked by the tender light of the 
storm.* The towers of the island churches loomed 
faint and far away in the dimness ; the sailors in the 
rigging of the ships that lay in the Basin wrought 
like phantoms among the shrouds ; the gondolas stole 
in and out of the opaque distance more noiselessly 
and dreamily than ever ; and a silence, almost palpa- 
ble, lay upon the mutest city in the world. 

^ St. Theodore was the first patron of Venice, but he was de- 
posed and St. Mark adopted, when the bones of the latter were 
brought from Alexandria. The Venetians seem to have felt 
some compunctions for this desertion of an early friend, and they 
have given St. Theodore a place on one of the granite pillars, 
while the other is surmounted by the Lion, representing St. Mark. 
Fra Marco e Todaro, is a Venetian proverb expressing the state of 
perplexity which we indicate by the figure of an ass between two 
bundles of hay. 



CHAPTER IV. 

COMINCIA FAR CALDO. 

The Place of St. Mark is the heart of Venice, and 
from this beats her life in every direction through an 
intricate system of streets and canals that bring it 
back again to the same centre. So, if the slightest 
uneasiness had attended the frequency with which I 
lost my way in the city at first, there would always 
have been this comfort : that the place was veiy small 
in actual extent, and that if I continued walking I 
must reach the Piazza sooner or later. There is a 
crowd constantly tending to and from it, and you 
have but to take this tide, and be drifted to St. 
Mark's — or to the Rialto Bridge, whence it is di- 
rectly accessible. 

Of all the open spaces in the city, that before the 
Church of St. Mark alone bears the name of Piazza, 
and the rest are called merely campi^ or fields. But 
if the company of the noblest architecture can give 
honor, the Piazza San Marco merits its distinction, 
not in Venice only, but in the whole world ; for I 
fancy that no other place in the world is set in such 
goodly bounds. Its westward length is terminated 
by the Imperial Palace ; its lateral borders are 
formed by lines of palace called the New Procu- 



COMINCIA FAR CALDO. 55 

ratle on the right, and the Old Procuratie on the 
left ; * and the Church of St. Mark fills np almost 
its whole width upon the east, leaving space enough, 
however, for a ghmpse of the Gothic perfection of 
the Ducal Palace. The place then opens southward 
with the name of Piazzetta, between the f/stern fa- 
cade of the Ducal Palace and the classic front of the 
Libreria Vecchia, and expands and ends at last on 
the mole, where stand the pillars of St. Mark and St. 
Theodore ; and then this mole, passing the southern 
fagade of the Doge's Palace, stretches away to the 
Public Gardens at the eastern extremity of the city, 
over half a score of bridges, between lines of houses 
and shipping — stone and wooden w^alls — in the 
long, crescent-shaped quay called Riva degli Schia- 
voni. Looking northward up the Piazzetta from the 
Molo, the vision traverses the eastern breadth of the 
Piazza, and rests upon the Clock Tower, gleaming 
with blue and gold, on which the bronze Giants beat 
the hours ; or it climbs the great mass of the Cam- 
panile San Marco, standing apart from the church at 
the corner of the New Procuratie, and rising four 
hundred feet toward the sky — the sky where the 
Venetian might well place liis heaven, as the Moors 
bounded Paradise in the celestial expanse that roofed 
Granada. 

My first lodging was but a step out of the Piazza, 
and this vicinity brought me early into familiar ac- 
quaintance with its beauty. But I never, during 

^ In Republican days the palaces of the Procuratori di San 
Marco. 



56 VENETIAN LIFE. 

three years, passed through it m my daily walks, 
without feehng as freshly as at first the greatness 
of this beauty. The church, which the mighty 
bell-tower and the lofty height of the palace-hnes 
make to look low, is in nowise humbled by the con- 
trast, but is like a queen enthroned amid upright rev- 
erence. The religious sentiment is deeply appealed 
to, I think, in the interior of St. Mark's ; but if its 
interior is heaven's, its exterior, like a good man's 
daily life, is earth's ; and it is this winning loveli- 
ness of earth that first attracts you to it, and when 
you emerge from its portals, you enter upon spaces 
of such sunny length and breadth, set round with 
such exquisite architecture, that it makes you glad 
to be living in this world. Before you expands 
the great Piazza, peopled with its various life ; 
on your left, between the Pillars of the Piazzetta, 
swims the blue lagoon, and overhead climb the 
arches, one above another, in excesses of fantastic 
grace. 

Whatever could please, the Venetian seems to 
have brought hither and made part of his Piazza, 
that it might remain forever the city's supreme 
grace ; and so, though there are public gardens and 
several pleasant walks in the city, the great resort 
in summer and winter, by day and by night, is the 
Piazza San Marco. Its ground-level, under the Pro- 
curatie, is belted with a glittering line of shops and 
caflfe, the most tasteful and brilliant in the world, 
and the arcades that pass round three of its sides 
are filled with loungers and shoppers, even when 



COMINCIA FAR CALDO. 57 

there is music by the Austrian bands ; for, as we 
have seen, the purest patriot may then walk under 
the Procuratie, without stain to the principles which 
would be hopelessly blackened if he set foot in the 
Piazza. The absence of dust and noisy hoofs and 
wheels tempts social life out of doors in Venice more 
than in any other Italian city, though the tendency 
to this sort of expansion is common throughout Italy. 
Beginning with the warm days of early May, and 
continuing till the villeggiatura (the period spent at 
the country seat) interrupts it late in September, all 
Venice goes by a single impulse oidolce far niemte^ and 
sits gossiping at the doors of the innumerable caffd' 
on the Riva degli Schiavoni, in the Piazza San Marco, 
and in the different squares in every part of the city. 
But, of course, the most brilliant scene of this kind 
is in St. Mark's Place, which has a night-time glory 
indescribable, won from the light of uncounted lamps 
upon its architectural groups. The superb Imperial 
Palace — the sculptured, arcaded, and pillared Pro- 
curatie — the Byzantine magic and splendor of the 
church — will it all be there when you come again 
to-morrow night ? The unfathomable heaven above 
seems part of the place, for I think it is never so 
tenderly blue over any other spot of earth. And 
when the sky is blurred with clouds, shall not the 
Piazza vanish with the azure ? — People, I say, come 
to drink coffee, and eat ices here in the summer 
evenings, and then, what with the promenades in the 
arcades and in the Piazza, the music, the sound of 
feet, and the hum of voices, unbroken by the ruder 



68 VENETIAN LIFE. 

uproar of cities where there are horses and wheels — 
the effect is that of a large evening party, and in this 
aspect the Piazza is like a vast drawing-room. 

I liked well to see that strange life, which even 
the stout, dead-in-earnest little Bohemian musicians, 
piping in the centre of the Piazza, could not alto- 
gether substantialize, and which constantly took im- 
materiality from the loveliness of its environment. 
In the winter the scene was the most purelj^ Vene- 
tian, and in my first winter, when I had abandoned 
all thought of churches till spring, I settled down to 
steady habits of idleness and cofltee, and contemplated 
the life of the Piazza. 

By all odds, the loungers at Florian's were the 
most interesting, because they were the most various. 
People of all shades of politics met in the dainty 
little saloons, though there were shades of division 
even there, and they did not m^ingle. The Italians 
carefully assorted themselves in a room furnished 
with green velvet, and the Austrians and the 
Austriacanti frequented a red-velvet room. They 
w^ere curious to look at, those tranquil, indolent, 
Italian loafers, and I had an uncommon relish for 
them. They seldom spoke together, and when they 
did speak, they burst from silence into tumultuous 
controversy, and then lapsed again into perfect si- 
lence. The elder amoncr them sat with their hands 
carefully folded on the heads of their sticks, gazing 
upon tho ground, or else buried themselves in the 
perusal of the French journals. The younger stood 
a good deal about the doorways, and now and then 



COMINCIA FAR CALDO. 69 

passed a gentle, gentle jest with the elegant waiters 
in black coats and white cravats, who hurried to and 
fro with the orders, and called them out in strident 
tones to the accountant at his little table ; or some- 
times these young idlers make a journey to the room 
devoted to ladies and forbidden to smokers, looked 
long and deliberately in upon its loveliness, and then 
returned to the bosom of their taciturn companions. 
By chance I found them playing chess, but very 
rarely. They were all well-dressed, handsome men, 
with beards carefully cut, brilliant hats and boots, 
and conspicuously clean linen. I used to wonder 
who they were, to what order of society they be- 
longed, and whether they, like my worthless self, 
had never any thing else but lounging at Florian's 
to do ; but I really know none of these things to this 
day. Some men in Venice spend their noble, useful 
lives in this w^ay, and it was the proud reply of a 
Venetian father, when asked of what profession his 
son was, "j& in Piazza ! " That was, he bore a cane, 
wore light gloves, and stared from Florian's windows 
at the ladies who went by. 

At the Caffe Quadri, immediately across the 
Piazza, there was a scene of equal hopefulness. But 
there, all was a glitter of uniforms, and the idling 
was carried on with a great noise of conversation in 
Austrian-German. Heaven knows what it was all 
about, but I presume the talk was upon topics of 
mutual improvement, calculated to advance the in- 
terests of self-government and mankind. These 
officers were very comely, intelligent-looking people, 



GO VENETIAN LIFE. 

with tlie most good-natured faces. They came and 
went restlessly, sitting down and knocking their 
steel scabbards against the tables, or rising and strad- 
dhnei: off* with their Ions: swords kickino- arainst their 
legs. They are the most stylish soldiers in the 
w^orld, and one has no notion how ill they can dress 
when left to themselves, till one sees them in civil 
clothes. 

Further up toward the Fabbrica Nuova (as the 
Imperial Palace is called), under the Procuratie 
Vecchie, is the Caffe Specchi, frequented only by 
young Italians, of an order less wealthy than those 
who go to Florian's. Across from this caff'^ is 
that of the Emperor of Austria, resorted to chiefly 
by non-commissioned officers, and civilian oflScials 
of lower grade. You know the latter, at a glance, 
by their beard, which in Venice is an index to every 
man's politics : no Austriacante wears the imperial, 
no Italianissimo shaves it. Next is the Caff'e Suttil, 
rather Austrian, and frequented by Italian codini^ 
or old fogies, in politics : gray old fellows, who 
caress their sticks with more .constant zeal than 
even the elders at Florian's. Quite at the other 
end of the Procuratie Nuove is the Caff'd of the 
Greeks, a nation which I have commonly seen rep- 
resented there by two or three Albanians with an 
Albanian boy, who, being dressed exactly like his 
father, curiously impressed me, as if he were the 
young of some Oriental animal — say a boy-elephant, 
or infant camel. 

I hope that the reader adds to this sketch, even in 



COMINCIA FAR CALDO. 61 

the winter time, occasional tourists under the Pro- 
curatie, at the caffd, and in the shops, where the 
shop-keepers are devouring them with the keen- 
ness of an appetite unsated by the hordes of summer 
visitors. I hope that the reader also groups me fish- 
ermen, gondoliers, beggars, and loutish boys about 
the base of St. Mark's, and at the feet of the three 
flag-staffs before the church ; that he passes me a 
slatternly woman and a frowzy girl or two through 
the Piazza occasionally ; and that he calls down the 
flocks of pigeons hovering near. I fancy the latter 
half ashamed to show themselves, as being aware 
that they are a great humbug, and unrightfully in 
the guide-books. 

Meantime, while I sit at Florian's, sharing and 
studying the universal worthlessness about me, the 
brief winter passes, and the spring of the south — so 
unlike the ardent season of the north, w^here it burns 
full summer before the snows are dried upon the 
fields — descends upon the city and the sea. But 
except in the little gardens of the palaces, and where 
here and there a fig-tree lifts its head to peer over 
a lofty stone wall, the spring finds no response of 
swelling bud and unfolding leaf, and it is human na- 
ture alone which welcomes it. Perhaps it is for this 
reason that the welcome is more visible in Venice 
than elsewhere, and that here, where the effect of 
the season is narrowed and limited to men's hearts, 
the joy it brings is all the keener and deeper. It is 
certain at least that the rapture is more demonstra- 
tive. The city, at all times voiceful, seems to burst 



62 VENETIAN LIFE. 

into song with the advent of these golden days and 
silver nights. Bands of young men go singing 
through the moonlit streets, and the Grand Canal 
reechoes the music of the parties of young girls as 
they drift along in the scarcely moving boats, and 
sing the glories of the lagoons and the loves of fish- 
ermen and gondoHers. In the Public Gardens they 
walk and sing ; and wandering minstrels come forth 
before the caff§, and it is hard to get beyond the 
tinkling of guitars and the scraping of fiddles. It is 
as if the city had put off its winter humor with its 
winter dress ; and as Venice in winter is the dreari- 
est and gloomiest place in the world, so in spring it 
is the fullest of joy and light. There is a pleasant 
bustle in the streets, a ceaseless clatter of feet over 
the stones of the squares, and a constant movement 
of boats upon the canals. 

We say, in a cheap and careless w^ay, that the 
southern peoples have no homes. But this is true 
only in a restricted sense, for the Italian, and the 
Venetian especially, makes the whole city his home 
in pleasant weather. No one remains under a roof 
who can help it ; and now, as I said before, the fasci- 
nating out-door life begins. All day long the peo- 
ple sit and drink coflFee and eat ices and gossip to- 
gether before the caff§, and the soft midnight sees 
the same diligent idlers in their places. The prom- 
enade is at all seasons the favorite Italian amuse- 
ment ; it has its rigidly fixed hours, and its limits 
are also fixed : but now, in spring, even the prom- 
enade is a Httle lawless, and the crowds upon the 



COMINCIA FAR CALDO. 63 

Riva sometimes walk as far as the Public Gardens, 
and throng all the wider avenues and the Piazza ; 
while young Venice comes to take the sun at St. 
Mark's in the arms of its high-breasted nurses, — 
mighty country-women, w^ho, in their bright cos- 
tumes, their dangling chains, and head-dresses of 
gold and silver baubles, stride through the Piazza 
with the high, free-stepping movement of blood- 
horses, and look like the women of some elder race 
of barbaric vigor and splendor, which, but for them, 
had passed away from our puny, dull-clad times. 

"E la stagion che ognuno s'innamora ; " 

and now young girls steal to their balconies, and 
linger there for hours, subtly conscious of the young 
men sauntering to and fro, and looking up at them 
from beneath. Now, in the shady little courts, the 
Venetian housewives, who must perforce remain in- 
doors, put out their heads and gossip from window 
to window ; while the pretty water - carriers, filling 
their buckets from the wells below, chatter and laugh 
at their work. Every street down which you look 
is likewise vocal with gossip ; and if the picturesque 
projection of balconies, shutters, and chimneys, of 
which the vista is full, hide the heads of the gossip- 
ers, be sure there is a face looking out of every 
window for all that, and the social, expansive pres- 
ence of the season is felt there. 

The poor, whose sole luxury the summer is, lavish 
the spring upon themselves unsparingly. They come 
forth from their dark dens in crumbling palaces and 



64 VENETIAN LIFE. 

damp basements, and live in the sunliglit and the 
welcome ah\ They work, they eat, they sleep out 
of doors. Mothers of families sit about their doors 
and spin, or walk volubly up and down with other 
slatternly matrons, armed with spindle and distaff; 
while their raven-haired daughters, lounging near 
the threshold, chase the covert insects that haunt 
the tangles of the children's locks. Within doors 
shines the bare bald head of the grandmother, who 
never ceases talking for an instant. 

Before the winter passed, I had changed my habi- 
tation from rooms near the Piazza to quarters on the 
Campo San Bartolomeo, through which the busiest 
street in Venice passes, from St. Mark's to the 
Rialto Bridge. It is one of the smallest squares of 
the city, and the very noisiest, and here the spring 
came with intolerable uproar. I had taken my 
rooms early in March, when the tumult under my 
windows amounted only to a cheerful stir, and made 
company for me ; but when the winter broke, and the 
windows were opened, I found that I had too much 
society. 

Each campo in Venice is a little city, self-con- 
tained and independent. Each has its church, of 
which it was in the earliest times the burial-ground ; 
and each within its limits compasses an apothe- 
cary's shop, a mercer's and draper's shop, a black- 
smith's and shoemaker's shop, a caff^, more or less 
brilliant, a green-grocer's and fruiterer's, a family 
grocery — nay, there is also a second-hand mer- 
chant's shop where you buy and sell every kind of 



COMINCIA FAR CALDO. 65 

worn-out thing at the lowest rates. Of course there 
is a coppersmith's and a watchmaker's, and pretty 
certainly a wood-carver's and gilder's, while without 
a barber's shop no campo could preserve its integrity 
or inform itself of the social and political news of 
the day. In addition* to all these elements of bustle 
and disturbance, San iBartolomeo swarmed with the 
traflSc and rang with the bargains of the Rialto 
market. 

Here the small dealer makes up in boastful clamor 
for the absence of quantity and assortment in his 
wares ; and it often happens that an almost impercep- 
tible boy, with a card of shirt-buttons and a paper 
of hair-pins, is much worse than the Anvil Chorus 
with real anvils. Fishermen, with baskets of fish 
upon their heads ; peddlers, with trays of housewife 
wares ; louts who dragged baskets of lemons and 
oranges back and forth by long cords ; men who 
sold water by the glass ; charlatans who advertised 
cement for mending broken dishes, and drops for the 
cure of toothache ; jugglers who spread their carpets 
and arranged their temples of magic upon the ground ; 
organists who ground their organs; and poets of 
the people who brought out new songs, and sang and 
sold them to the crowd ; — these were the children 
of confusion, whom the pleasant sun and friendly air 
woke to frantic and interminable uproar in San Bar- 
tolomeo. 

Yet there was a charm about all this at first, and 
I spent much time in the study of the vociferous life 
under my windows, trying to make out the meaning 



66 VENETIAN LIFE. 

of the different cries, and to trace them back to their 
sources. There was one which puzzled me for a 
long time — a sharp, peahng cry that ended in a 
wail of angry despair, and, rising high above all 
other sounds, impressed the spirit like the cry of that 
bird in the tropic forests which the terrified Span- 
iards called the alma perdida. After many days of 
listening and trembling, I found that it proceeded 
from a wretched, sun-burnt girl, who carried about 
some dozens of knotty pears, and whose hair hung 
disheveled round her eyes, bloodshot with the strain 
of her incessant shrieks. 

In San Bartolomeo, as in other squares, the build- 
ings are palaces above and shops below. The 
ground-floor is devoted to the small commerce of 
various kinds already mentioned ; the first story 
above is occupied by tradesmen's families ; and on 
the third or fourth floor is the appartamento signorile. 
From the balconies of these stories hung the cages 
of innumerable finches, canaries, blackbirds, and 
savage parrots, which sang and screamed wdth de- 
light in the noise that rose from the crowd. All the 
human life, therefore, which the spring drew to the 
casements was perceptible only in dumb show. One 
of the palaces opposite was used as a hotel, and faces 
continually appeared at the windows. By all odds 
the most interesting figure there was that of a stout 
peasant serving-girl, dressed in a white knitted jacket, 
a crimson neckerchief, and a bright-colored gown, 
and wearing long dangling ear-rings of yellowest 
gold. For hours this idle maiden balanced herself 



COMINCIA FAR CALDO. 67 

half over the balcony-rail in perusal of the people 
under her, and I suspect made love at that distance, 
and in that constramed position, to some one in the 
crowd. On another balcony, a lady sat and knitted 
with crimson yarn ; and at the window of still an- 
other house, a damsel now looked out upon the 
square, and now gave a glance into the room, in the 
evident direction of a mirror. Venetian neighbors 
have the amiable custom of studying one another's 
features through opera-glasses ; but I could not per- 
suade myself to use this means of learning the mir- 
ror's response to the damsel's constant " Fair or 
not ? " being a believer in every woman's right to 
look well a little way off. I shunned whatever 
trifling temptation there was in the case, and turned 
again to the campo beneath — to the placid dandies 
about the door of the caffS ; to the tide of passers 
from the Merceria ; the smooth-shaven Venetians of 
other days, and the bearded Venetians of these ; the 
dark - eyed, white - faced Venetian girls, hooped in 
cruel disproportion to the narrow streets, but richly 
clad, and moving with southern grace ; the files of 
heavily burdened soldiers ; the little policemen loi» 
tering lazily about with their swords at their sides,, 
and in their spotless Austrian uniforms. 

As the spring advances in Venice, and the heat 
increases, the expansive delight with which the city 
hails its coming passes into a tranquiler humor, as 
if the joy of. the beautiful season had sunk too 
deeply into the city's heart for utterance. I, too,, 
felt this longing for quiet, and as San Bartolonveo 



68 VENETIAN LIFE. 

continued untouched by it, and all day roared and 
thundered under my windows, and all night long 
gave itself up to sleepless youths who there melodi- 
ously bayed the moon in chorus, I was obliged to 
abandon San Bartolomeo, and seek calmer quarters 
where I might enjoy the last luxurious sensations of 
the spring-time in peace. 

Now, with the city's lapse into this tranquiler hu- 
mor, the promenades cease. The facchino gives all 
his leisure to sleeping in the sun ; and in the mellow 
afternoons there is scarcely a space of six feet square 
on the Riva degli Schiavoni which does not bear its 
brown-cloaked peasant, basking face-downward in 
the warmth. The broad steps of the bridges are by 
right the berths of the beggars ; the sailors and fish- 
ermen slumber in their boats ; and the gondoliers, if 
they do not sleep, are yet placated by the season, and 
forbear to quarrel, and only break into brief clam- 
ors at the sight of inaccessible Inglesi passing near 
them under the guard of valets de place. Even the 
play of the children ceases, except in the Public 
Gardens, where the children of the poor have indo- 
lent games, and sport as noiselessly as the lizards 
that slide from shadow to shadow and glitter in the 
sun asleep. This vernal silence of the city possesses 
you, — the stranger in it, — not with sadness, not 
with melancholy, but with a deep sense of the sweet- 
ness of doing nothing, and an indifference to all pur- 
poses and chances. If ever you cared to have your 
name on men's tongues, behold ! that old yearning 
for applause is dead. Praise would strike like pain 



COMINCIA FAR CALDO. 69 

through this delicious calm. And blame ? It is a 
wild and frantic thing to dare it by any effort. Repose 
takes you to her inmost heart, and you learn her se- 
crets — arcana unintelligible to you in the new- 
world life of bustle and struggle. Old lines of lazy 
rhyme win new color and meaning. The mystical, 
indolent poems w^hose music once charmed away all 
will to understand them, are revealed now without 
your motion. Now, at last, you know why 

" It was an Abyssinian maid '^ 

who played upon the dulcimer. And Xanadu ? It 
is the land in which you were born! 

The slumbrous bells murmur to each other in the 
lagoons ; the white sail faints into the white distance ; 
the gondola slides athwart the sheeted silver of the 
bay ; the blind beggar, who seemed sleepless as fate, 
dozes at his post. 



CHAPTER V. 

OPERA AISD THEATRES. 

With the winter came to an end the amusement 
which, in spite of the existing poHtical demonstration, 
I had drawn from the tlieatres. The Fenice, the 
great theatre of the city, being the property of pri- 
vate persons, has not been opened since the discon- 
tents of the Venetians were intensified in 1859 ; and 
it will not be opened, they say, till Victor Emanuel 
comes to honor the ceremony. Though not large, 
and certainly not so magnificent as the Venetians 
think, the Fenice is a superb and tasteful theatre. 
The best opera was formerly given in it, and now 
that it is closed, the musical drama, of course, suffers. 
The Italians seldom go to it, and as there is not a 
sufficient number of foreign residents to support it in 
good style, the opera commonly conforms to the 
character of the theatre San Benedetto, in which it 
is given, and is second-rate. It is nearly always sub- 
sidized by the city to the amount of several thousand 
florins ; but nobody need fall into the error, on this 
account, of supposing that it is cheap to the opera- 
goer, as it is in the little German cities. A box does 
not cost a great deal ; but as the theatre is carried on 
in Italy by two different managements, — one of which 



OPERA AND THEATRES. 71 

receives the money for the boxes and seats, and the 
other the fee of admission to the theatre, — there is 
always the demand of the latter to be satisfied with 
nearly the same outlay as that for the box, before 
you can reach your place. The pit is fitted up with 
seats, of course, but you do not sit down there with- 
out paying. So, most Italians (who if they go at all 
go without ladies) and the poorer sort of government • 
officials stand ; the orchestra seats are reserved for 
the officers of the garrison. The first row of boxes, 
which is on a level with the heads of people in the 
pit, is well enough, but rank and fashion take a lof- 
tier flight, and sit in the second tier. 

You look about in vain, however, for that old life 
of the theatre which once formed so great a part of 
Venetian gayety, — the visits from box to box, the 
gossiping between the acts, and the half-occalt flir- 
tations. The people in the boxes are few, the dress- 
ing not splendid, and the beauty is the blond, unfre- 
quent beauty of the German aliens. Last winter 
being the fourth season the Italians had defied the 
temptation of the opera, some of the Venetian ladies 
yielded to it, but went plainly dressed, and sat far 
back in boxes of the third tier, and when they issued 
forth after the opera were veiled beyond recognition. 
The audience usually takes its enjoyment quietly ; 
hissing now and then for silence in the house, and 
clapping hands for applause, without calling hravo^ — 
an Italian custom which I have noted to be chiefly 
habitual with foreigners : with Germans, for instance, 
who spell it with a ^ and /. 



72 VENETIAN LIFE. 

I fancy that to find good Italian opera you must 
seek it somewhere out of Italy, — at London, or 
Paris, or New York, — thougli possibly it might be 
chanced upon at La Scala in Milan, or San Carlo in 
Naples. The cause of the decay of the musical art 
in Venice must be looked for among the events which 
seem to have doomed her to decay in every thing ; 
certainly it cannot be discerned in any indifference 
of the people to music. The dimostrazione keeps the 
better class of citizens from the opera, but the pas- 
sion for it still exists in every order ; and God's gift 
of beautiful voice cannot be smothered in the race 
by any Situation. You hear the airs of opera sung as 
commonly upon the streets in Venice as our own 
colored melodies at home ; and the street-boy when 
he sings has an inborn sense of music and a power 
of execution which put to shame the cultivated tenu- 
ity of sound that issues from the northern mouth — 

" That frozen, passive, palsied breatliing-hole." 

In the days of the Fenice there was a school for 
the ballet at that theatre, but this last and least 
worthy part of dramatic art is now an imported ele- 
ment of the opera in Venice. No novices appear on 
her stages, and the musical conservatories of the place, 
which were once so famous, have long ceased to exist. 
The musical theatre was very popular in Venice as 
early as the middle of the seventeenth century ; and 
the care of the state for the drama existed from the 
first. The government, which always piously forbade 
the representation of Mysteries, and, as the theatre 



OPERA AND THEATRES. 73 

advanced, even prohibited plays containing eliaracters 
of the Old or New Testament, began about the close 
of the century to protect and encourage the instruc- 
tion of music in the different foundhng hospitals and 
public refuges in the city. The young girls in these 
institutions were taught to play on instruments, and 
to sing, — at first for the alleviation of their own dull 
and solitary life, and afterward for the delight of the 
public. In the merry days that passed just before 
the fall of the Republic, the Latin oratorios which 
they performed in the churches attached to the hos- 
pitals were among the most fashionable diversions in 
Venice. The singers were instructed by the best 
masters of the time ; and at the close of the last cen- 
tury, the conservatories of the Incurables, the Found- 
lings, and the Mendicants were famous throughout 
Europe for their dramatic concerts, and for those 
pupils who found the transition from sacred to pro- 
fane opera natural and easy. 

With increasing knowledge of the language, I 
learned to enjoy best the unmusical theatre, and went 
oftener to the comedy than the opera. It is hardly 
by any chance that the Italians play ill, and I have 
seen excellent acting at the Venetian theatres, both 
in the modern Italian comedy, wdiich is very rich 
and good, and in the elder plays of Goldoni — com- 
positions deliciously racy when seen in Venice, 
where alone their admirable fidelity of drawing and 
coloring can be perfectly appreciated. The best 
comedy is usually given to the educated classes at 
the pretty Teatro Apollo, while a bloodier and louder 



74 VENETIAN LIFE. 

drama is offered to the populace at Teatro Malibran, 
where on a Sunday night you may see the plebeian 
life of the city in one of its most entertaining and 
characteristic phases. The sparings of the whole week 
which have not been laid out for chances in the lot- 
tery, are spent for this evening's amusement ; and in 
the vast pit you see, besides the families of comfort- 
able artisans who can evidently afford it, a multitude 
of the ragged poor, whose presence, even at the low 
rate of eight or ten soldi * apiece, it is hard to account 
for. It is very peremptory, this audience, in its 
likes and dislikes, and applauds and hisses with great 
vehemence. It likes best the sanguinary local spec- 
tacular drama ; it cheers and cheers again every al- 
lusion to Venice ; and when the curtain rises on some 
well-known Venetian scene, it has out the scene- 
painter by name three times — which is all the po- 
lice permits. The auditors wear their hats in the 
pit, but deny that privilege to the people in the boxes, 
and raise stormy and wrathful cries of cappello ! 
till these uncover. Between acts, they indulge in 
excesses of water flavored with anise, and even go 
to the extent of candied nuts and fruits, which are 
hawked about the theatre, and sold for two soldi the 
stick, — with the tooth-pick on which they are spitted 
thrown into the bargain. 

The Malibran Theatre is well attended on Sunday 
night, but the one entertainment which never fails 
of drawinn; and delio-htin^ full houses is the theatre 

* The soldo is the hundredth part of the Austrian florin, which 
is worth about forty-nine cents of American money. 



OPERA AND THEATRES. 76 

of the puppets, or the Marionette, and thither I like 
best to go. The Marionette prevail with me, for 1 
find in the performances of these puppets, no new 
condition demanded of the spectator, but rather a 
frank admission of unreality that makes every shadow 
of verisimilitude delightful, and gives a marvelous 
relish to the immemorial effects and traditionary 
tricks of the stage. 

The little theatre of the puppets is at the corner 
of a narrow street opening from the Calle del Ridotto, 
and is of the tiniest dimensions and simplest appoint- 
ments. There are no boxes — the whole theatre is 
scarcely larger than a stage-box — and you pay ten 
soldi to go into the pit, where you are much more 
comfortable than the aristocrats who have paid fif- 
teen for places in the dress-circle above. The stage 
is very small, and the scenery a kind of coarse min- 
iature painting. But it is very complete, and every 
thing is contrived to give relief to the puppets and 
to produce an illusion of magnitude in their figures. 
They are very artlessly introduced, and are maneu- 
vered, according to the exigencies of the scene, by 
means of cords running from their heads, arms, and 
legs to the top of the stage. To the management 
of the cords they owe all the vehemence of their 
passions and the grace of their oratory, not to men- 
tion a certain gliding, ungradual locomotion, alto- 
gether spectral. 

The drama of the Marionette is of a more elevated 
and ambitious tone than that of the Burattini, which 
exhibit their vulgar loves and coarse assassinations 



76 VENETIAN LIFE. 

in little puncli-sliows on the Riva, and in the larger 
squares ; but the standard characters are nearly the 
same with both, and are all descended from the 
commedia a hraccio * which flourished on the Italian 
stage before the time of Goldoni. And I am very 
far from disparaging the Burattini, which have great 
and peculiar merits, not the least of which is the art 
of drawing the most delighted, dirty, and picturesque 
audiences. Like most of the Marionette, they con- 
verse vicariously in the Venetian dialect, and have 
such a rapidity of utterance that it is difficult to fol- 
low them. I only remember to have made out one 
of their comedies, — a play in which an ingenious 
lover procured his rich and successful rival to be ar- 
rested for lunacy, and married the disputed young 
person while the other was raging in the mad-house. 
This play is performed to enthusiastic audiences ; 
but for the most part the favorite drama of the 
Burattini appears to be a sardonic farce, in which the 
chief character — a puppet ten inches high, with a 
fixed and staring expression of Mephistophelean good- 
nature and wickedness — deludes other and weak- 
minded puppets into trusting him, and then beats 
them with a club upon the back of the head until 
they die. The murders of this infamous creature, 
which are alway executed in a spirit of jocose sang- 
froid^ and accompanied by humorous remarks, are 
received with the keenest relish by the .spectators ; 
and, indeed, the action is every way worthy of ap 
plause. The dramatic spirit of the Italian race 
^ Comedy bj the yard. 



OPERA AND THEATRES. 77 

seems to communicate itself to the puppets, and they 
perform their parts with a fidehty to theatrical un- 
naturalness which is wonderful. I have witnessed 
death agonies on these little stages which the great 
American tragedian himself (whoever he may hap- 
pen to be) could not surpass in degree of energy. 
And then the Burattini deserve the greater credit 
because they are agitated by the legs from below the 
scene, and not managed by cords from above, as at 
the Marionette Theatre. Their audiences, as I said, 
are always interesting, and comprise : first, boys 
ragged and dirty in inverse ratio to their size ; then 
weak little girls, supporting immense weight of 
babies ; then Austrian soldiers, with long coats and 
short pipes ; lumbering Dalmat sailors ; a transient 
Greek or Turk ; Venetian loafers, pale-faced, stat- 
uesque, with the drapery of their cloaks thrown over 
their shoulders ; young women, with bare heads of 
thick black hair ; old women, all fluff and fangs ; 
wooden-shod peasants, w^ith hooded cloaks of coarse 
brown ; then boys — and boys. They all enjoy 
the spectacle with approval, and take the drama an 
grand serieux^ uttering none of the gibes which some- 
times attend efforts to please in our own country. 
Even wdien the hat, or other instrument of extortion, 
is passed round, and they give nothing, and when 
the manager, in an excess of fury and disappoint- 
ment, calls out, '' Ah ! sons of dogs ! I play no more 
to you ! " and closes the theatre, they quietly and 
unresentfully disperse. Though, indeed, fioi de cani 
means no great reproach in Venetian parlance ; and 



78 VENETIAN LIFE. 

parents of the lower classes caressingly address their 
children in these terms. Whereas to call one Figure 
of a Pig, is to wreak upon him the deadliest insult 
which can be put into words. 

In the eommedia a hraccio^ before mentioned as the 
inheritance of the Marionette, the dramatist fur- 
nished merely the plot, and the outline of the action ; 
the players filled in the character and dialogue. 
With any people less quick-witted than the Italians, 
this sort of comedy must have been insufferable, but 
it formed the dehght of that people till the middle 
of the last century, and even after Goldoni went to 
Paris he furnished his Italian players with the com-- 
media a braccio. I have heard some very passable 
gags at the Marionette, but the real eommedia a 
braccio no longer exists, and its familiar and invaria- 
ble characters perform written plays. 

Facanapa is a modern addition to the old stock of 
dramatis personce^ and he is now witb^'ut doubt the 
popular favorite in Venice. He is always, like Pan- 
talon, a Venetian ; but whereas the latter is always a 
merchant, Facanapa is any thing that the exigency 
of the play demands. He is a dwarf, even among 
puppets, and his dress invariably consists of black 
knee-breeches and white stockings, a very long, full- 
skirted black coat, and a three-cornered hat. His 
individual traits are displayed in all his characters, 
and he is ever a coward, a boaster, and a liar ; a 
glutton and avaricious, but withal of an agreeable 
bonhomie that wins the heart. To tell the truth, 
I care little for the plays in which he has no part, 



OPEEA AND THEATRES. 79 

and I have learned to think a certain trick of his — 
lifting his leg rigidly to a horizontal line, by way of 
emphasis, and saying, '' Capisse la ? " or '' Sa la ? " 
(You understand ? You know ? ) — one of the finest 
things in the world. 

In nearly all of Goldoni's Venetian comedies, and 
in many which he wrote in Italian, appear the stand- 
ard associates of Facanapa, — Arlecchino, il Dottore, 
Pantalon dei Bisognosi, and Brighella. The reader 
is at first puzzled by their constant recurrence, but 
never weary of Goldoni's witty i^ianagement of them. 
They are the chief persons of the obsolete commedia 
a hraceio^ and have their nationality and peculiarities 
marked by immemorial attribution. Pantalon is a 
Venetian merchant, rich, and commonly the indul- 
gent father of a wilful daughter or dissolute son, fig- 
uring also sometimes as the childless uncle of large 
fortune. The second old man is il Dottore, who is a 
Bolognese, and a doctor of the University. Brighella 
and Arlecchino are both of Bergamo. The one is a 
sharp and roguish servant, busy-body, and rascal; 
the other is dull and foolish, and always masked and 
dressed in motley — a gibe at the poverty of the 
Bergamasks among whom, moreover, the extremes 
of stupidity and cunning are most usually found, ac- 
cording to the popular notion in Italy. 

The plays of the Marionette are written expressly 
for them, and are much shorter than the standard 
drama as it is known to us. They embrace, how- 
ever, a wide range of subjects, from lofty melodrama 
to broad farce, as you may see by looking at the ad- 



80 VENETIAN LIFE. 

vertisements in the Venetian Gazettes for any week 
past, where perhaps you shall find the plays per- 
formed to have been : The Ninety-nine Misfortunes 
of Facanapa ; Arlecchino, the Sleeping King ; Fa- 
canapa as Soldier in Catalonia ; The Capture of 
Smyrna, with Facanapa and Arlecchino Slaves in 
Smyrna (this play being repeated several nights) ; 
and, Arlecchino and Facanapa Hunting an Ass. 
If you can fancy people going night after night to 
this puppet-drama, and enjoying it with the keenest 
appetite, you will not only do something toward real- 
izing to yourself the easily-pleased Italian nature, but 
you will also suppose great excellence in the theat- 
rical management. For my own part, I find few 
things in life equal to the Marionette. I am never 
tired of their bewitching absurdity, their inevitable 
defects, their irresistible touches of verisimilitude. 
At their theatre I have seen the relenting parent 
(Pantalon) twitchingly embrace his erring son, while 
Arlecchino, as the large-hearted cobbler who has 
paid the house-rent of the erring son when the prod- 
igal was about to be cast into the street, looked on 
and rubbed his hands with amiable satisfaction and 
the conventional delight in benefaction which we all 
know. I have witnessed the base terrors of Faca- 
napa at an apparition, and I have beheld the keen 
spiritual agonies of the Emperor Nicholas on hearing 
of the fall of Sebastopol. Not many passages of 
real life have affected me as deeply as the atrocious 
behavior of the brutal baronial brother-in-law, when 
he responds to the expostulations of his friend the 



OPERA AND THEATRES. 81 

Knight of Malta, — a puppet of shaky and vacillating 
presence, but a soul of steel and rock : 

" Why, O baron, detain this unhappy lady in thy 
dungeons? Remember, she is thy brother's wife. 
Remember thine own honor. Think on the sacred 
name of virtue." (Wrigglingly, and with a set 
countenance and gesticulations toward the pit.) 

To which the ferocious baron makes answer with 
a sneering laugh, " Honor ? — I know it not ! Vir- 
tue ? — I detest it!" and attempting to pass the 
knight, in order to inflict fresh indignities upon his 
sister-in-law, he yields to the natural infirmities of 
rags and pasteboard, and topples against him. 

Facanapa, also, in his great scene of the Haunted 
Poet, is tremendous. You discover him in bed, too 
much visited by the Muse to sleep, and reading his 
manuscripts aloud to himself, after the manner of 
poets when they cannot find other listeners. He is 
alarmed by various ghostly noises in the house, and 
is often obliged to get up and examine the dark cor- 
ners of the room, and to look under the bed. When 
at last the spectral head appears at the foot-board, 
Facanapa vanishes with a miserable cry under the 
bed-clothes, and the scene closes. Intrinsically the 
scene is not much, but this great actor throws into it 
a life, a spirit, a drollery wholly irresistible. 

The ballet at the Marionette is a triumph of 
choreographic art, and is extremely funny. The 
prima ballerina has all the difficult grace and far- 
fetched arts of the prima ballerina of flesh and blood ; 
and when the enthusiastic audience calls her back 
6 



82 VENETIAN LIFE. 

after the scene, she is humanly delighted, and ac- 
knowledges the compliment with lifelike empresses 
ment. I have no doubt the corps de ballet have their 
private jealousies and bickerings, when quietly laid 
away in boxes, and deprived of all positive power 
by the removal of the cords which agitate their arms 
and legs. The puppets are great in pirouette and 
pas seul ; but I think the strictly dramatic part of 
such spectacular ballets, as The Fall of Carthage, is 
their strong point. 

The people who witness their performances are of 
all ages and conditions — I remember to have once 
seen a Russian princess and some German count- 
esses in the pit — but the greater number of spec- 
tators are young men of the middle classes, pretty 
shop-girls, and artisans and their wives and children. 
The little theatre is a kind of trysting-place for lovers 
in humble life, and there is a great deal of amusing 
drama going on between th:> acts, in which the inva- 
riable Beppo and Nina of the Venetian populace 
take the place of the invariable Arlecchino and 
Facanapa of the stage. I one day discovered a letter 
at the bottom of the Canal of the Giudecca, to which 
watery resting-place some recreant, addressed as 
" Caro Antonio," had consigned it ; and from this 
letter I came to know certainly of at least one love 
affair at the Marionette. '' Caro Antonio " was 
humbly besought, '' if his heart still felt the force of 
love," to meet the w^riter (who softly reproached him 
with neglect) at the Marionette the night of date, at 
six o'clock ; and I would not like to believe he could 



OPERA AND THEATRES. 83 

resist so tender a prayer, though perhaps it fell out 
so. I fished up through the lucent water this de- 
spairing little epistle, — it was full of womanly sweet- 
ness and bad spelling, — and dried away its briny 
tears on the blade of my oar. If ever I thought to 
keep it, with some vague purpose of offering it to 
any particularly anxious-looking Nina at the Marion- 
ette as to the probable writer — its unaccountable 
loss spared me the delicate office. Still, however, 
when I go to see the puppets, it is with an interest 
divided between the drolleries of Facanapa, and the 
sad presence of expectation somewhere among the 
groups of dark-eyed girls there, who wear such im- 
mense hoops under such greasy dresses, who part 
their hair at one side, and call each other " Cio ! " 
Where art thou, O fickle and cruel, yet ever dear 
Antonio ? All unconscious, I think, — gallantly 
posed against the wall, thy slouch hat brought for- 
ward to the point of thy long cigar, the arms of thy 
velvet jacket folded on thy breast, and thy ear-rings 
softly twinkling in the light. 



CHAPTER VL 

VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS. 

When I first came to Venice, I accepted the fate 
appointed to young men on the Continent. I took 
lodgings, and I began dining drearily at the restau- 
rants. Worse prandial fortunes may befall one, but 
it is hard to conceive of the continuance of so great 
unhappiness elsewhere ; while the restaurant life is 
an established and permanent thing in Italy, for every 
bachelor and for many forlorn families. It is not be- 
cause the restaurants are very dirty — if you wipe 
your plate and glass carefully before using them, they 
need not stomach you ; it is not because the rooms 
are cold — if you sit near the great vase of smolder- 
ing embers in the centre of each room you may suf- 
focate in comparative comfort ; it is not because the 
prices are great — they are really very reasonable ; 
it is not for any very tangible fault that I object to 
life at the restaurants, and yet I cannot think of its 
hopeless homelessness without rebellion against the 
wdiole system it implies, as something unnatural and 
insufferable. 

But before we come to look closely at this aspect 
of Italian civihzation, it is better to look first at a 
very noticeable trait of Italian character, — temper- 



VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS. 86 

ance in eating and drinking. As to the poorer classes, 
one observes without great surprise how slenderly 
they fare, and how with a great habit of talking of 
meat and drink, the verb mangiare remains in fact 
for the most part inactive with them. But it is only 
just to say that this virtue of abstinence seems to be 
not wholly the result of necessity, for it prevails with 
other classes which could well afford the opposite 
vice. Meat and drink do not form the substance of 
conviviality with Venetians, as with the Germans and 
the English, and in degree with ourselves ; and I 
have often noticed on the Mondays-at-the-Gardens, 
and other social festivals of the people, how the 
crowd amused itself with any thing — - music, dancing, 
walking, talking — any thing but the great northern 
pastime of gluttony. Knowing the life of the place, 
I make quite sure that Venetian gayety is on few oc- 
casions connected with repletion ; and I am ashamed 
to confess that I have not always been able to repress 
a feeling of stupid scorn for the empty stomachs 
everywhere, which do not even ask to be filled, or, 
at least, do not insist upon it. The truth is, the 
North has a gloomy pride in gastronomic excess, 
which unfits her children to appreciate the cheerful 
prudence of the South. 

Venetians eat but one meal a day, which is dinner. 
They breakfast on a piece of bread with coffee and 
milk ; supper is a little cup of black coffee, or an ice, 
taken at a caffS. The coffee, however, is repeated 
frequently throughout the day ; and in the summer- 
time fruit is eaten, but eaten sparingly, like every 



86 VENETIAN LIFE. 

thing else. As to the nature of the dinner, it of 
course varies somewhat according to the nature of 
the diner ; but in most famiHes of the middle class 
a dinner at home consists of a piece of boiled beef, a 
minestra (a soup thickened with vegetables, tripe, 
and rice), a vegetable dish of some kind, and the 
wine of the country. The failings of the repast 
among all classes lean to the side of simplicity, and 
the abstemious character of the Venetian finds suffi- 
cient comment in his familiar invitation to dinner : 
" Venga a mangiar quattro risi con wg." (Come eat 
four grains of rice with me.) 

But invitations to dinner have never formed a 
prime element of hospitality in Venice. Goldoni 
notices this fact in his memoirs, and speaking of the 
city in the early half of the last century, he says 
that the number and excellence of the eating-houses 
in the city made invitations to dinner at private 
houses rare, and superfluous among the courtesies 
offered to strangers. 

The Venetian does not, like the Spaniard, place 
his house at your disposition, and, having extended 
this splendid invitation, consider the duties of hos- 
pitality fulfilled ; he does not appear to think you 
want to make use of his house for social purposes, 
preferring himself the caflE'd, and finding home and 
comfort there, rather than under his own I'oof. 
" What caffe do you frequent ? Ah ! so do I. We 
shall meet often there." This is frequently your 
new acquaintance's promise of friendship. And one 
may even learn to like the social footing on which 



VENETIAN DINNEES AND DINERS. 87 

people meet at the caff'd, as well as that of the par- 
lor or drawing-room. I could not help thinking one 
evening at Padua, while we sat talking with some 
pleasant Paduans in one of the magnificent saloons of 
the CafF^ Pedrocchi, that I should hke to go there for 
society, if I could always find it there, much better 
than to private houses. There is far greater ease 
and freedom, more elegance and luxury, and not the 
slightest weight of obligation laid upon you for the 
gratification your friend's company has given you. 
One has not to be a debtor in the sum of a friend's 
outlay for house, servants, refreshments, and the 
like. Nowhere in Europe Is the senseless and waste- 
ful American custom of treating known ; and noth- 
ing could be more especially foreign to the frugal 
instincts and habits of the Italians. So, when a 
party of friends at a caffd eat or drink, each one 
pays for what he takes, and pecuniarily, the enjoy- 
ment of the evening is uncostly or not, according as 
each prefers. Of course no one sits down in such a 
place without calling for something ; but I have fre- 
quently seen people respond to this demand of cus- 
tom by ordering a glass of water with anise, at the 
expense of two soldi. A cup of black coffee, for five 
soldi, secures a chair, a table, and as many journals 
as you like, for as long time as you like. 

I say, a stranger may learn to like the life of the 
caffe, — that of the restaurant never ; though the 
habit of frequenting the restaurants, to which Gol- 
doni somewhat vaingloriously refers, seems to have 
grown upon the Venetians with the lapse of time, 



88 VENETIAN LIFE. 

The eating-houses are ahnost without number, and 
are of every degree, from the sliop of the sausage- 
maker, who supphes gondoliers and facchini with 
bowds of sguassetto^ to the CaffS Florian. They all 
have names which are not strange to European ears, 
but which are sufficiently amusing to people who come 
from a land where nearly every public thing is named 
from some inspiration of patriotism or local pride. 
In Venice the principal restaurants are called The 
Steamboat, The Savage, The Little Horse, The 
Black Hat, and The Pictures ; and I do not know 
that any one of them is more uncomfortable, un- 
cleanly, or noisy than another, or that any one of 
them suffers from the fact that all are bad. 

You do not get breakfast at the restaurant for the 
reason, before stated, of the breakfast's unsubstan- 
tialitv. The dining; commences about three o'clock 
in the afternoon, and continues till nine o'clock, most 
people dining at five or six. As a rule the attend- 
ance is insufficient, and no guest is served until he has 
made a savage clapping on the tables, or clinking on 
his glass or plate. Then a hard-pushed waiter ap- 
pears, and calls out, dramatically, " Behold me ! " 
takes the order, shrieks it to the cook, and returning 
with the dinner, cries out again, more dramatically 
than ever, " Behold it ready ! " and arrays it with a 
great flourish on the table. I have dined in an hotel 
at Niagara, to the music of a brass band ; but I did 
not find that so utterly bewildering, so destructive 
of the individual savor of the dishes, and so con- 
ducive to absent-minded gluttony, as I at first 



VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS. 89 

found the constant rush and clamor of the waiters in 
the Venetian restaurants. The guests are, for the 
most part, patient and quiet enough, eating their 
minestra and boiled beef in such peace as the sur- 
rounding uproar permits them, and seldom making 
acquaintance with each other. It is a mistake, I 
think, to expect much talk from any people at dinner. 
The ingenious English tourists who visit the United 
States from time to time, find us silent over our 
meat, and I have noticed the like trait among people 
of divers races in Europe. 

As I have said, the greater part of the diners 
at the restaurants are single, and seem to have no 
knowledge of each other. Perhaps the gill of the 
fiendish wine of the country, which they drink at 
their meals, is rather calculated to chill than warm 
the heart. But, in any case, a drearier set of my 
fellow-beings I have never seen, — no, not at evening 
parties, — and I conceive that their life in lodgings, 
at the caffd and the restaurant, remote from the 
society of women and all the higher privileges of fel- 
lowship for which men herd together, is at once the 
most gross and insipid, the most selfish and comfort- 
less life in the world. Our boarding-house life in 
America, dull, stupid, and flat as it often is, seems 
to me infinitely better than the restaurant life of 
young Italy. It is creditable to Latin Europe that, 
with all this homelessness and domestic outlawry, 
its young men still preserve the gentleness of civili- 
zation. 

The families that share the exile of the eating- 



90 VENETIAN LIFE. 

houses sometimes make together a feeble buzz of con- 
versation, but the unfriendly spirit of the place seems 
soon to silence them. Undoubtedly they frequent 
the restaurant for economy's sake. Fuel is costly, 
and the restaurant is cheap, and its cooking better 
than they could perhaps otherwise afford to have. 
Indeed, so cheap is the restaurant that actual ex- 
perience proved the cost of a dinner there to be 
little more than the cost of the raw material in the 
market. From this inexpensiveness comes also the 
custom, which is common, of sending home to pur- 
chasers meals from the eating-houses. 

As one descends in the scale of the restaurants, 
the difference is not so noticeable in the prices of the 
same dishes, as in the substitution of cheaper varieties 
of food. At the best eating-houses, the Gallic tra- 
ditions bear sway more or less, but in the poorer sort 
the cooking is done entirely by native artists, deriv- 
ing their inspirations from the unsophisticated tastes 
of exclusively native diners. It is perhaps needless 
to say that thej grow characteristic and picturesque 
as they grow dirty and cheap, until at last the cook- 
shop perfects the descent with a triumph of raciness 
and local coloring. The cook-shop in Venice opens 
upon you at almost every turn, — everywhere, in fact, 
but in the Piazza and the Merceria, — and looking 
in, you see its vast heaps of frying fish, and its huge 
caldrons of ever-boiling broth which smell to heaven 
with garlic and onions. In the seducing windows 
smoke golden mountains oi polenta (a thicker kind 
of mush or hasty-pudding, made of Indian meal, and 



VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS. 91 

universally eaten in North Italy), platters of crisp 
minnows, bowls of rice, roast poultry, dishes of snails 
and liver ; and around the fascinating walls hang 
huge plates of bronzed earthenware for a lavish and 
a hospitable show, and for the representation of those 
scenes of Venetian story which are modeled upon 
them in bass-relief. Here I like to take my unknown 
friend — my scoundrel facchino or rascal gondolier 
— as he comes to buy his dinner, and bargains elo- 
quently with the cook, who stands with a huge ladle 
in his hand capable of skimming mysterious things 
from vasty depths. I am spell-bound by the drama 
w^hich ensues, and in which all the chords of the 
human heart are touched, from those that tremble at 
high tragedy, to those that are shaken by broad farce. 
When the diner has bought his dinner, and issues 
forth with his polenta in one hand, and his fried 
minnows or stewed snails in the other, my fancy 
fondly follows him to his gondola-station, where he 
eats it, and quarrels volubly w^ith other gondoliers 
across the Grand Canal. 

A simpler and less ambitious sort of cook-shop 
abounds in the region of Rialto, where on market 
mornings I have seen it driving a prodigious business 
with peasants, gondoliers, and laborers. Its more 
limited resources consist chiefly of fried eels, fish, 
polenta, and sguassetto. The latter is a true roba 
veneziana^ and is a loud-flavored broth, made of those 
desperate scraps of meat which are found impracti- 
cable even by the sausage-makers. Another, but 



92 VENETIAN LIFE. 

more delicate dish, peculiar to the place, Is the clotted 
blood of poultry, fried in slices with onions. A 
great number of the families of the poor breakfast 
at these shops very abundantly, for three soldi each 
person. 

In Venice every holiday has its appropriate viand. 
During carnival all the butter and cheese shop-win- 
dows are whitened with the snow of beaten cream — 
panamontata. At San Martino the bakers parade 
troops of gingerbread warriors. Later, for Christ- 
mas, comes mandorlato^ which is a candy made of 
honev and enriched with almonds. In its season 
only can any of these devotional delicacies be had ; 
but there is a species of cruller, fried in oil, which 
has all seasons for Its own. On the occasion of every 
festa^ and of every sagra (which is the holiday of 
one parish only), stalls are erected in the squares for 
the cooking and sale of these crullers, between which 
and the religious sentiment proper to the whole year 
there seems to be some occult relation. 

In the winter, the whole city appears to aban- 
don herself to cooking for the public, till she threatens 
to hopelessly disorder the law of demand and supply. 
There are, to begin with, the caff§ and restaurants 
of every class. Then there are the cook-shops, and 
the poulterers', and the sausage-makers'. Then, also, 
every fruit-stall Is misty and odorous with roast 
apples, boiled beans, cabbage, and potatoes. The 
chestnut - roasters Infest every corner, and men, 
women, and children cry roast pumpkin at every 



VENETIAN DINNERS AND DINERS. 93 

turn — till, at last, hunger seems an absurd and fool- 
ish vice, and the ubiquitous beggars, no less than the 
habitual abstemiousness of every class of the popula- 
tion, become the most perplexing and maddening of 
anomalies. 



CHAPTER VII. 

HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 

I HOPE that it IS by a not unnatural progress I pass 
from speaking of dinners and diners to the kindred 
subject of the present chapter, and I trust the reader 
will not disdain the lowly-minded muse that sings this 
mild domestic lay. I was resolved in writing this 
book to tell what I had found most books of travel 
very slow to tell, — as much as possible of the every- 
day life of a people whose habits are so different from 
our own ; endeavoring to develop a just notion of 
their character, not only from the show-traits which 
strangers are most likely to see, but also from experi- 
ence of such things as strangers are most likely to 
miss. 

The absolute want of society of my own nation 
in Venice would have thrown me upon study of the 
people for my amusement, even if I had cared to 
learn nothing of them ; and the necessity of econom- 
ical housekeeping would have caused me to live in 
the frugal Venetian fashion, even if I had been dis- 
posed to remain a foreigner in every thing. Of 
bachelor lodgings I had sufficient experience dur- 
ing my first year ; but as most prudent travelers 
who visit the city for a week take lodgings, I need 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 95 

not describe my own particularly. You can tell the 
houses in which there are rooms to let, by the 
squares of white paper fastened to the window-shut- 
ters ; and a casual glance as you pass through the 
streets, gives you the idea that the chief income of 
the place is derived from letting lodgings. Carpet- 
less, dreary barracks the rooms usually are, with an 
uncompromising squareness of prints upon the wall, 
an appalling breadth of husk-bed, a niggardness of 
wash-bowl, and an obduracy of sofa, never, never 
to be dissociated in their victim's mind from the idea 
of the villanous hard bread of Venice on which the 
gloomy landlady sustains her life with its immutable 
purposes of pkmder. Flabbiness without softness is 
the tone of these discouraging chambers, which are 
dear or not according to the season and the situation. 
On the sunlit Riva during winter, and on the Grand 
Canal in summer, they are costly enough, but they 
are to be found on nearly all the squares at reason- 
able rates. On the narrow streets, where most na- 
tive bachelors have them, they are absurdly cheap. 

As in nearly all places on the Continent, a house 
in Venice means a number of rooms, including a 
whole story in a building, or part of it only, but 
always completely separated from the story above 
and below, or from, the other rooms on the same 
floor. Every house has its own entrance from the 
street, or by a common hall and stairway from the 
ground-floor, w^here are the cellars or store-rooms, 
while each kitchen is usually on a level with the 
other rooms of the house to which it belongs. The 



96 VENETIAN LIFE. 

isolation of the different families is secured (as per- 
fectly as where a building is solely appropriated to 
each), either by the exclusive possession of a street- 
door,* or by the unsocial domestic habits of Europe. 
You bow and give good-day to the people whom you 
meet in the common hall and on the common stair- 
way, but you rarely know more of them than their 
names, and you certainly care nothing about them. 
The sociabihty of Europe, and more especially of 
Southern Europe, is shown abroad ; under the do- 
mestic roof it dwindles and disappears. And indeed 
it is no wonder, considering how dispiriting and com- 
fortless most of the houses are. The lower windows 
are heavily barred with iron ; the wood-work is rude, 
even in many palaces in Venice ; the rest is stone 
and stucco ; the walls are not often papered, though 
they are sometimes painted : the most pleasing and 
invitinp; feature of the interior is the frescoed ceiling; 
of the better rooms. The windows shut imperfectly, 
the heavy wooden blinds imperviously (is it worth 
while to observe that there are no Venetian blinds in 

^ Where the street entrance is in common, every floor has its 
bell, which being sounded, summons a servant to some upper 
window with the demand, most formidable to strangers, '^ Chi 
see?'' (Who is it?) But you do not answer with your name. 
You reply, " Amici ! " (Friends!) on which comforting reassur- 
ance, the servant draws the latch of the door by a wire running 
upward to her liand, and permits you to enter and wander about 
at your leisure till you reach her secret height. This is, suppos- 
ing the master or mistress of the house to be at home. If they 
are not in, she answers your "Amici!*' with "No ghe ne xe/" 
(Nobody here!) and lets down a basket by a string outside the 
window, and fishes up your card. 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 97 

Venice ? ) ; the doors lift slantingly from the floor, 
in which their lower hinges are imbedded ; the stoves 
are of plaster, and consume fuel without just return 
of heat ; the balconies alone are always charming, 
whether they hang high over the streets, or look out 
upon the canals, and, with the gayly painted ceilings, 
go far to make the houses habitable. 

It happens in the case of houses, as with nearly 
every thing else in Italy, that you pay about the same 
price for half the comfort that you get in America. 
In Venice, most of the desirable situations are on 
the Grand Canal ; but here the rents are something 
absurdly high, when taken in consideration with the 
fact that the city is not made a place of residence by 
foreigners like Florence, and that it has no commer- 
cial activity to enhance the cost of living. House- 
hunting, under these circumstances, becomes an office 
of constant surprise and disconcertment to the stran- 
ger. You look, for example, at a suite of rooms in 
a tumble-down old palace, where the walls, shame- 
lessly smarted up with coarse paper, crumble at your 
touch ; where the floor rises and falls like the sea, 
and the door-frames and w^indow-cases have lono; lost 
all recollection of the plumb. Madama la Baronessa 
is at present occupying these pleasant apartments, 
and you only gain admission to them after an em- 
bassy to procure her permission. Madama la Baron- 
essa receives you courteously, and you pass through 
her rooms, which are a little in disorder, the Baron- 
essa being on the point of removal. Madama la Bar- 
onessa's hoop-skirts prevail upon the floors ; and at 



98 VENETIAN LIFE. 

the side of the couch which her form lately pressed 
in shimber, you observe a French novel and a wasted 
candle in the society of a half-bottle of the wine 
of the country. A bedroomy smell pervades the 
whole suite, and through the open w^indow comes a 
curious stench explained as the odor of Madama la 
Baronessa's guinea-pigs, of which she is so fond that 
she has had their sty placed immediately under her 
window in the garden. It is this garden which has 
first taken your heart, w^ith a ghmpse caught through 
the great open door of the palace. It is disordered 
and wild, but so much the better ; its firs are very 
thick and dark, and there are certain statues, fauns 
and nymphs, which weather stains and mosses have 
made much decenter than the sculptor intended. 
You think that for this garden's sake you could put 
up with the house, which must be very cheap. What 
is the price of the rooms ? you ask of the smiling 
landlord. He answers, without winking, " If taken 
for several years, a thousand florins a year." At 
which you suppress the whistle of disdainful surprise, 
and say you think it will not suit. He calls your 
attention to the sun, which comes in at every side, 
which will roast you in summer, and will not (as he 
would have you think) warm you in w^inter. "But 
there is another apartment," — through which you 
drag languidly. It is empty now, being last inhab- 
ited by an English Ledi, — and her stove-pipes went 
out of the w^indows, and blackened the shabby stucco 
front of the villanous old palace. 

In a back court, upon a filthy canal, you chance 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 99 

on a house, the curiously frescoed front of which 
tempts you within. A building which has a lady 
and gentleman painted in fresco, and making love 
from balcony to balcony, on the facade, as well as 
Arlecchino depicted in the act of leaping from the 
second to the third story, promises s'omething. Prom- 
ises something, but does not fulfill the promise. The 
interior is fresh, clean, and new, and cold and dark 
as a cellar. This house — that is to say, a floor of 
the house — you may have for four hundred florins 
a year ; and then farew^ell the world and the light 
of the sun ! for neither will ever find you in that 
back court, and you will never see any body but the 
neighboring laundresses and their children, who can- 
not enough admire the front of your house. 

E via in seguito ! This is of house keeping, not 
house-hunting. There are pleasant and habitable 
houses in Venice — but they are not cheap, as many 
of the uninhabitable houses also are not. Here, 
discomfort and ruin have their price, and the tumble- 
down is patched up and sold at rates astonishing to 
innocent strangers who come from countries in good 
repair, where the tumble-down is worth nothing. 
If I were not ashamed of the idle and foolish old 
superstitions in which I once believed concerning life 
in Italy, I would tell how I came gradually to expect 
very little for a great deal ; and how a knowledge of 
many houses to let, made me more and more con- 
tented with the house we had taken. 

It was in one corner of an old palace on the 
Grand Canal, and the window of the little parlor 



100 VENETIAN LIFE. 

looked down upon the water, which had made friends 
with its painted ceiling, and bestowed tremulous, 
golden smiles upon it when the sun shone. The 
dining-room was not so much favored by the water, 
but it gave upon some green and ever-rustling tree- 
tops, that rose to it from a tiny garden-ground, no 
bigger than a pocket handkerchief. Through this 
window, also, we could see the quaint, picturesque 
life of the canal ; and from another room w^e could 
reach a little terrace above the water. We were 
not in the appartamento %ignorile^ — that w^as above, 
— but we were more snugly quartered on the first 
story from the ground-floor, commonly used as a 
winter apartment in the old times. But it had been 
cut up, and suites of rooms had been broken accord- 
ing to the caprice of successive landlords, till it was 
not at all palatial any more. The upper stories still 
retained something of former grandeur, and had ac- 
quired with time more than former discomfort. We 
were not envious of them, for they were humbly let 
at a price less than we paid ; though we could not 
quite repress a covetous yearning for their arched 
and carven windows, which we saw sometimes from 
the canal, above the tops of the garden trees. 

The gondoliers used always to point out our palace 
(which was called Casa Falier) as the house in 
which Marino Faliero was born ; and for a long time 
we clung to the hope that it might be so. But how- 
ever pleasant it was, we were forced, on reading up 

=* The noMe floor — as the second or third story of the palace 
is called. 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 101 

the subject a little, to relinquish our illusion, and 
accredit an old palace at Santi Apostoli with the dis- 
tinction we would fain have claimed for ours. I am 
rather at a loss to explain how it made our lives in 
Casa Falier any pleasanter to think that a beheaded 
traitor had been born in it, but we relished the su- 
perstition amazingly as long as we could possibly 
believe in it. What went far to confirm us at first 
in our credulity was the residence, in another part 
of the palace, of the Canonico Falier, a lineal de- 
scendant of the unhappy doge. He w^as a very 
mild-faced old priest, with a wdiite head, which he 
carried downcast, and crimson legs, on which he 
moved but feebly. He owned the rooms in which 
he lived, and the apartment in the front of the palace 
just above our own. The rest of the house belonged 
to another, for in Venice many of the palaces are 
divided up and sold among different purchasers, floor 
by floor, and sometimes even room by room. 

But the tenantry of Casa Falier was far , more 
various than its proprietorship. Over our heads 
dwelt a Dalmatian family ; below our feet a French- 
w^oman ; at our right, upon the same floor, an English 
gentleman ; under him a French family ; and over 
him the family of a marquis in exile from Modena. 

Except with Mr. , the Englishman, who w^as at 

once our friend and landlord (impossible as this may 
appear to those who know any thing of landlords in 
Italy), we had no acquaintance, beyond that of sal- 
utation, with the many nations represented in our 
house. We could not lielp holding the French peo- 



102 VENETIAN LIFE. 

pie in some sort responsible for the invasion of Mex- 
ico ; and, though opportunity offered for cultivating 
the acquaintance of the Modenese, we did not im- 
prove it. 

As for our Dalmatian friends, we met them and 
bowed to them a great deal, and we heard them 
overhead in frequent athletic games, involving noise 
as of the maneuvering of cavalry ; and as they stood 
a good deal on their balcony, and looked down upon 
us on ours, we sometimes enjoyed seeing them ad- 
mirably foreshortened like figures in a frescoed ceil- 
ing. The father of this family was a little man of a 
solemn and impressive demeanor, who had no other 
occupation but to walk up and down the city and 
view its monuments, for which purpose he one day 
informed us he had left his native place in Dalmatia, 
after forty years' study of Venetian history. He 
further told us that this was by no means worth the 
time given it ; that whereas the streets of Venice 
were sepulchres in point of narrowness and obscu- 
rity, he had a house in Zara, from the windows of 
which you might see for miles uninterruptedly ! 
This little gentleman wore a black hat, in the last 
livid polish of respectability, and I think fortune was 
not his friend. The hat was too large for him, as 
the hats of Italians always are ; it came down to his 
eyes, and he carried a cane. Every evening he 
marched solemnly at the head of a procession of his 
handsome young children, who went to hear the mil- 
itary music in St. Mark's Square. 

The entrance to the house of the Dalmatians — 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 103 

we never knew their names — gave access also to a 
house in the story above them, which belonged to 
some mysterious person described on his door-plate 
as " Co. Prata." I think we never saw Co. Prata 
himself, and only by chance some members of his 
family when they came back from their summer in 
the country to spend the winter in the city. Prata's 
" Co.," we gradually learnt, meant " Conte," and 
the little counts and countesses, his children, imme- 
diately on their arrival took an active part in the 
exercises of the Dalmatian cavalry. Later in the 
fall, certain of the count's vassals came to the riva^ 
in one of the great boats of the Po, with a load of 
brush and corncobs for fuel — and this is all we ever 
knew of our neighbors on the fourth floor. As long 
as he remained '' Co." we yearned to know who and 
what he was ; being interpreted as Conte Prata, he 
ceased to interest us. 

Such, then, was the house, and such the neighbor- 
hood in which two little people, just married, came 
to live in Venice. 

They were by nature of the order of shorn lambs, 
and Providence, tempering the inclemency of the 
domestic situation, gave them Giovanna. 

The house was furnished throughout, and Giovanna 
had been furnished with it. She was at hand to 
greet the new-comers, and '' This is my wdfe, the 
new mistress," said the young Paron^-f with the bash- 
ful pride proper to the time and place. 

=^ The gondola landing-stairs which descend to the water before 
palace-doors and at the ends of streets. ' 

Padrone in Italian. A salutation with Venetian friends? 



It .1 



104 VENETIAN LIFE. 

Giovanna glowed welcome, and said, with adven- 
turous politeness, she was very glad of it. 

" Berva sua ! " 

The Parona^ not knowing Italian, laughed in 
English. 

So Giovanna took possession of us, and acting 
upon the great truth that handsome is that hand- 
some does, began at once to make herself a thing 
of beautv. 

As'a measure of convenience and of deference to 
her feelings, we immediately resolved to call her 
G., merely, when speaking of her in English, instead 
of Giovanna, which would have troubled her with 
conjecture concerning what was said of her. And 
as G. thus becam^e the centre around which our do- 
mestic life revolved, she must be somewhat particu- 
larly treated of in this account of our housekeeping. 
I suppose that, given certain temperaments and cer- 
tain circumstances, this would have been much like 
keeping play-house anywhere ; in Venice it had, but 
for the unmistakable florins it cost, a curious prop- 
erty of unreality and impermanency. It is suffi- 
ciently bad to live in a rented house ; in a house 
which you have hired ready-furnished, it is long till 
your life takes root, and Home blossoms up in the 
alien place. For a great while we regarded our 
ouse merely as very pleasant lodgings, and we were 
slow to form any relations which could take from our 
residence its temporary character. Had we but 

and the title by which Venetian servants always designate their 
employers. 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 105 

thought to get m debt to the butcher, the baker, 
and the grocer, we might have gone far to establish 
ourselves at once ; but we imprudently paid our way, 
and consequently had no ties to bind us to our fellow- 
creatures. In Venice provisions are bought by 
housekeepers on a scale surprisingly small to one ac- 
customed to wholesale American ways, and G., 
having the purse, made our little purchases in cash, 
never buying more than enough for one meal at a 
time. Every morning, the fruits and vegetables are 
distributed from the great market at the Rialto among 
a hundred greengrocers' stalls in all parts of the 
city ; bread (which is never made at home) is found 
fresh at the baker's ; there is a butcher's stall in each 
campo with fresh meat. These shops are therefore 
-resorted to for family supplies day by day ; and the 
poor lay in provisions there in portions graduated to 
a soldo of their ready means. A great Bostonian 
whom I remember to have heard speculate on the 
superiority of a state of civilization in which you 
could buy two cents' worth of beef to that in which 
so small a quantity was unpurchasable, would find 
the system perfected here,, where you can buy half 
a cent's w^orth. It is a system friendly to poverty, 
and the small retail prices approximate very closely 
the real value of the stuff sold, as we sometimes 
proved by offering to purchase in quantity. Usu- 
ally no reduction would be made from the retail rate, 
and it was sufficiently amusing to have the dealer 
figure up the cost of the quantity we proposed to 
buy, and then exhibit an exact multiplication of his 



106 VENETIAN LIFE. 

retail rate by our twenty or fifty. Say an orange is 
worth a soldo : you get no more than a hundred for 
a florin, though the dealer will cheerftilly go under 
that ]iumber if he can cheat you in the count. So 
in most things we found it better to let G. do the 
marketing in her own small Venetian fashion, and 
'^ guard our strangeness." 

But there were some things which must be brought 
to the house by the dealers, such as water for drink- 
ing and cooking, which is drawn from public cisterns 
in the squares, and carried by stout young girls to 
all the houses. These higolanti all come from the 
mountains of Friuli ; they all have rosy cheeks, 
white teeth, bright eyes, and no waists whatever (in 
the fashionable sense), but abundance of back. The 
cisterns are opened about eight o'clock in the morn- 
mg, and then their day's work begins with chatter, 
and splashing, and drawing up buckets from the 
wells ; and each sturdy little maiden in turn trots 
off under a burden of two buckets, — one appended 
from either end of a bow^ resting upon the right 
shoulder. The water is very good, for it is the rain 
which falls on the shelving surface of the campo, 
and soaks through a bed of sea-sand around the 
cisterns into the cool depths below. The bigolante 
comes every morning and empties her brazen buckets 
into the great picturesque jars of porous earthenware 
which ornament Venetian kitchens; and the daily 
supply of water costs a moderate family about a florin 
a month. 

Fuel is likewise brought to your house, but this 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. . 107 

arrives In boats. It is cut upon the eastern shore 
of the Adriatic, and comes to Venice in small coast- 
ing vessels, each of which has a plump captain in 
command, whose red face is so cunningly blended 
with his cap of scarlet flannel that it is hard on a 
breezy day to tell where the one begins and the other 
ends. These vessels anchor off the Custom House 
in the Guidecca Canal in the fall, and lie there all 
winter (or until their cargo of fuel is sold), a great 
part of the time under the charge solely of a small 
yellow dog of the irascible breed common to the 
boats of the Po. Thither the smaller dealers in fire- 
wood resort, and carry thence supplies of fuel to all 
parts of the city, melodiously crying their wares up 
and down the canals, and penetrating the land on 
foot with specimen bundles of fagots in their arms. 
They are not, as a class, imaginative, I think — their 
fancy seldom rising beyond the invention that their 
fagots are beautiful and sound and dry. But our 
particular woodman was, in his way, a gifted man. 
Long before I had dealings with him, I knew him 
by the superb song, or rather incantation, with 
which he announced his coming on the Grand Canal. 
The purport of this was merely that his bark was 
called the Beautiful Caroline, and that his fagots 
were fine ; but he so dwelt upon the hidden beauties 
of this idea, and so prolonged their effect upon the 
mind by artful repetition, and the full, round, and 
resonant roar with which he closed his triumphal 
hymn, that the spirit was taken with the charm, and 
held in breathless admiration. By all odds, this 



108 VENETIAN LIFE. 

woodman's cry was the most impressive of all the 
street cries of Venice. There may have been an 
exquisite sadness and sweetness in the wail of 
the chimney-sweep ; a winning pathos in the voice 
of the vender of roast pumpkin ; an oriental fancy 
and splendor in the fruiterers who cried " Melons 
with hearts of fire ! " and '' Juicy pears that bathe 
your beard ! " — there may have been something 
peculiarly effective in the song of the chestnut- 
man who shouted " Fat chestnuts," and added, 
after a lapse in w^iich you got almost beyond hear- 
ing, " and well cooked ! " — I do not deny that 
there w^as a seductive sincerity in the proclamation 
of one whose peaches could not be called beautiful to 
look upon, and were consequently advertised as 
*' Ugly, but good ! " — I say nothing to detract from 
the merits of harmonious chair-menders ; — to my 
ears the shout of the melodious fisherman was de- 
lectable music, and all the birds of summer sang in 
the voices of the countrymen w^ho sold finches and 
larks in cages, and roses and pinks in pots ; — but 
I say, after all, none of these j)eople combined the 
vocal power, the sonorous movement, the delicate 
grace, and the vast compass of our woodman. Yet 
this man, as far as virtue went, was vox et prceterea 
nihil. He was a vagabond of the most abandoned ; 
he was habitually in drink, and I think his sins had 
gone near to make him mad — at any rate he was 
of a most lunatlcal deportment. In other lands, the 
man of whom you are a regular purchaser, serves 
you well ; in Italy he conceives that his long service 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 109 

gives him the right to plunder you if possible. I 
felt in every fibre that this woodman invariably 
cheated me in measurement, and, indeed, he scarcely 
denied it on accusation. But my single experience 
of the more magnificent scoundrels of whom lie 
bought the wood originally, contented me with the 
swindle with which I had become familiarized. On 
this occasion I took a boat and went to the Cus- 
tom House, to get my fuel at first hand. The cap- 
tain of the ship which I boarded wished me to pay 
more than I gave for fuel delivered at my door, and 
thereupon ensued the tragic scene of bargaining, as 
these things are conducted in Italy. We stood up 
and bargained, we sat down and bargained ; the 
captain turned his back upon me in indignation ; I 
parted from him and took to my boat in scorn ; he 
called me back and displayed the wood — good, 
sound, dryer than bones; he pointed to the threat- 
ening heavens, and declared that it would snow that 
night, and on the morrow I could not get wood for 
twice the present price ; but I laughed incredulously. 
Then my captain took another tack, and tried to 
make the contract in obsolete currencies, in Austrian 
pounds, in Venetian pounds, but as I inexorably re- 
duced these into famihar money, he paused desper- 
ately, and made me an offer which I accepted with 
mistaken exultation. For my captain was shrewder 
than I, and held arts of measurement in reserve 
against me. He agreed that the measurement and 
transportation should not cost me the value of his 
tooth-pick — quite an old and worthless one — which 



110 . VENETIAN LIFE. 

he showed me. Yet I was surprised into the pay- 
ment of a youth whom this man called to assist at 
the measurement, and I had to give the boatman 
drink-money at the end. He promised that the 
measure should be just : yet if I lifted my eye from 
the work he placed the logs slantingly on the meas- 
ure, and threw in knotty chunks that crowded 
wholesome fuel out, and let the daylight through and 
through the pile. I protested, and he admitted the 
wrong when I pointed it out : " Gra razon^ lu ! " 
(He 's right !) he said to his fellows in infamy, and 
throwing aside the objectionable pieces, proceeded 
to evade justice by new artifices. When I had this 
memorable load of wood housed at home, I found 
that it had cost just what I paid my woodman, and 
that I had additionally lost my self-respect in being 
plundered before my face, and I resolved thereafter 
to be cheated in quiet dignity behind my back. 
The woodman exulted in his restored sovereignty, 
and I lost nothing in penalty for my revolt. 

Among other provisioners who come to your house 
in Venice, are those ancient peasant-women, who 
bring fresh milk in bottles carefully packed in baskets 
filled with straw. They set off the whiteness of 
their wares by the brownness of their sunburnt hands 
and faces, and bear in their general stoutness and 
burliness of presence, a curious resemblance to their 
own comfortable bottles. They wear broad straw 
hats, and dangling ear-rings of yellow gold, and are 
the pleasantest sight of the morning streets of Venice, 
to the stonlness of which they bring a sense of the 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. Ill 

country's clovery pasturage, in the milk just drawn 
from the great cream-colored cows. 

Fishermen, also, come dow^n the little calli — 
with shallow baskets of fish upon their heads and un- 
der either arm, and cry their soles and mackerel to 
the neighborhood, stopping now and then at some 
door to bargain away the eels which they chop into 
sections as the thrilling drama proceeds, and hand 
over as a denouement at the purchaser's own price. 
*' Beautiful and all alive ! " is the engaging cry with 
which they hawk their fish^ 

Besides these daily purveyors, there are men of 
divers arts who come to exercise their crafts at your 
house : not chimney-sw^eeps merely, but glaziers, 
and that sort of workmen, and, best of all, chair- 
menders, — who bear a mended chair upon their 
shoulders for a sign, with pieces of white wood for 
further mending, a drawing-knife, a hammer, and a 
sheaf of rushes, and who sit down at your door, and 
plait the rush bottoms of your kitchen-chairs anew, 
and make heaps of fragrant whittlings with their 
knives, and gossip with your serving-woman. 

But in the mean time our own serving-woman 
Giovanna, the great central principle of our house- 
keeping, is waiting to be personally presented to the 
company. In Italy, there are old crones so haggard, 
that it is hard not to believe them created just as 
crooked, and foul, and full of fluff and years as you 
behold them, and you cannot understand how so 
much frowziness and so little hair, so great show of 
fangs and so few teeth, are grow^ths from any ordi- 



112 ^ VENETIAN LIFE. 

nary human birth. G. is no longer young, but she 
IS not after the likeness of these old women. It is 
of a middle age, unbeginning, interminable, of which 
she gives you the impression. She has brown apple- 
cheeks, just touched with frost ; her nose is of a 
strawberry formation abounding in small dints, and 
having the slightly shrunken effect observable in 
tardy perfections of the fruit mentioned. A tough, 
pleasant, indestructible woman — for use, we thought, 
not ornament — the mother of a family, a good Cath- 
olic, and the flower of serving- women. 

I do not think that Venetian servants are, as a 
class, given to pilfering ; but knowing ourselves sub- 
ject by nature to pillage, we cannot repress a feeling 
of gratitude to G. that she does not prey upon us. 
She strictly accounts for all money given her at the 
close of each week, and to this end keeps a kind of 
account-book, which I cannot help regarding as in 
some sort an inspired volume, being privy to the fact, 
confirmed by her own confession, that G. is not good 
for reading; and writino;. On settlins; with her I 
have been permitted to look into this book, which is 
all in capital letters, — each the evident result of 
serious labor, — with figures representing combina- 
tions of the pot-hook according to bold and original 
conceptions. The spelhng is also a remarkable effort 
of creative genius. The only difficulty under which 
the author labors in regard to the book is the con- 
fusion naturally resulting from the effort to get liter- 
ature right side up when it has got upside down. 
The writing is a kind of pugilism — the strokes being 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 113 

made straight out from the shoulder. The account- 
book is always carried about with her in a fathomless 
pocket overflowing with the aggregations of a house- 
keeper who can throw nothing away, to wit : match- 
boxes, now appointed to hold buttons and hooks-and- 
eyes ; beeswax in the lump ; the door-key (whicL 
in Venice takes a formidable size, and impresses you 
at first sight as ordnance) ; a patch-bag ; a porte-mon- 
naie ; many lead-pencils in the stump ; scissors, pin- 
cushions, and the Beata Vergine in a frame. Indeed, 
this incapabihty of throwing things away is made to 
bear rather severely upon us in some things, such as 
the continual reappearance of familiar dishes at table 
— particularly veteran hifsteca. But we fancy that 
the same frugal instinct is exercised to our advantage 
and comfort in other things, for G. makes, a great 
show and merit of denying our charity to those bold 
and adventurous children of sorrow, who do not 
scruple to ring your door-bell, and demand alms. It 
is true that with G., as wath every Italian, almsgiv- 
ing enters into the theory and practice of Christian 
life, but she will not suffer misery to abuse its privi- 
leges. She has no hesitation, however, in bringing 
certain objects of compassion to our notice,, and she 
procures small services to be done for us by many 
lame and halt of her acquaintance. Having bought 
my boat (I come, in time, to be Avilhng to sell it 
again for half its cost to me), I require a menial to 
clean it now and then, and Giovanna first calls me a 
youthful Gobbo for the work, — a festive hunchback, 

a bright-hearted whistler of comic opera. Whether 
8 



114 VENETIAN LIFE. 

this blithe humor is not considered decent, I do not 
know, but though the Gobbo serves me faitlifully, I 
find him one day replaced by a venerable old man, 
whom — from his personal resemblance to Time — I 
should think much better occupied with an hour- 
glass, or engaged with a scythe in mowing me and. 
other mortals down, than in cleaning my boat. But 
all day long he sits on my riva in the sun, when it 
shines, gazing fixedly at my boat; and when the 
day is dark, he lurks about the street, accessible to 
my slightest boating impulse. He salutes my going 
out and coming in with grave reverence, and I think 
he has no work to do but that which G.'s wise com- 
passion has given him from me. Suddenly, like the 
Gobbo, the Veccio also disappears, and I hear 
vaguely — for in Venice you never know any thing 
with precision — that he has found a regular employ- 
ment in Padua, and again that he is dead. While he 
lasts, G. has a pleasant, even a sportive manner with 
this poor old man, calculated to cheer his declining 
years ; but, as I say, cases of insolent and aggres- 
sive misery fail to touch her. The kind of wretched- 
ness that comes breathing woe and sciampagnin * 
under our window, and there spends a leisure hour 
in the rehearsal of distress, establishes no claim 
either upon her pity or her weakness. She is deaf 
to the voice of that sorrow, and the monotonous 

^ Little champagne, — the name which the Venetian populace 
gave to a fierce and deadly kind of brandy dnmk during the 
scarcity of wine. After the introduction of coal-oil this liquor 
came to be jocosely known as petroUo. 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 115 

whine of that dolor cannot move her to the purchase 
of a gnilty tranquilKty. I imagine, however, that 
she is afraid to deny charity to the fat Capuchin friar 
in spectacles and bare feet, who comes twice a month 
to levy contributions of bread and fuel for his con- 
vent, for we hear her declare from the window that 
the master is not at home, whenever the good brother 
rings ; and at last, as this excuse gives out, she 
ceases to respond to his ring at alL 

Sometimes, during the summer weather, comes 
down our street a certain tremulous old troubadour 
with an aged cithern, on which he strums feebly with 
bones which remain to him from former fingers, and 
in a thin quivering voice pipes worn-out ditties of 
youth and love. Sadder music I have never heard, 
but though it has at times drawn from me the sigh 
of sensibility without referring sympathy to my 
pocket, I always hear the compassionate soldo of Gio- 
vanna clink reproof to me upon the pavement. Per- 
haps that slender note touches something finer than 
habitual charity in her middle-aged bosom, for these 
were songs she says that they used to sing when she 
was a girl, and Venice was gay and glad, and differ- 
ent from now — veramente^ tutf altro^ signor ! 

It is through Giovanna's charitable disposition that 
we make the acquaintance of two weird sisters, who 
live not far from us in Calle Falier, and whom we 
know to this day merely as the Creatures — creatura 
being in the vocabulary of Venetian pity the term 
for a fellow-being somewhat more pitiable than a 
poveretta. Our Creatures are both well stricken in 



116 VENETIAN LIFE. 

years, and one of them has some incurable disorder 
which frequently confines her to the wretched cellar 
in which they live with the invalid's husband, -^ a 
mild, pleasant-faced man, a tailor by trade, and of 
batlike habits, who hovers about their dusky doorway 
in the summer twilight. These people have but one 
room, and a little nook of kitchen at the side ; and 
not only does the sun never find his way into their 
habitation, but even the daylight cannot penetrate it. 
They pay about four florins a mxOnth for the place, 
and I hope their landlord is as happy as his tenants. 
For though one is sick, and all are wretchedly poor, 
they are far from being discontented. They are 
opulent in the possession of a small dog, which they 
have raised from the cradle, as it were, and adopted 
into the family. They are never tired of playing 
with their dog, — the poor old children, — and every 
slight display of intelligence on his part delights 
them. They think it fine in him to follow us as we 
go by, but pretend to beat him ; and then they ex- 
cuse him, and call him ill names, and catch him up, 
and hug him and kiss him. He feeds upon their 
slender means and the pickings that G. carefully 
carries him from our kitchen, and gives to him on 
our doorstep in spite of us, while she gossips with his 
mistresses, who chorus our appearance at such times 
with ^' Imiei rispetti^ signori ! " We often see them 
in the street, and at a distance from home, carry- 
ing mysterious bundles of clothes ; and at last we 
learn their vocation, which is one not known out of 
Italian cities, I think. There the state is Uncle to 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 117 

the liard-pressed, and instead of many pawnbrokers' 
shops there is one large municipal spout, which is 
called the Monte di Pieta, where the needy pawn 
their goods. The system is centuries old in Italy, 
but there are people who to this day cannot summon 
courage to repair in person to the Mount of Pity, 
and, to meet their wants, there has grown up a class 
of frowzy old women who transact the business for 
them, and receive a small percentage for their trouble. 
Our poor old Creatures w^ere of this class, and as 
there were many persons in impoverished, decaying 
Venice who had need of the succor they procured, 
they made out to earn a living when both were well, 
and to eke out existence by charity when one was ill. 
They were harmless neighbors, and I believe they 
regretted our removal, when this took place, for they 
used to sit down under an arcade opposite our new 
house, and spend the duller intervals of trade in the 
contemplation of our windows. 

The alarming spirit of nepotism which Giovanna 
developed at a later day was, I fear, a growth from 
the encouragement we gave her charitable disposi- 
tion. But for several months it was merely from the 
fact of a boy who came and whistled at the door 
until Giovanna opened it and reproved him in the 
name of all the saints and powers of darkness, that 
we knew her to be a mother ; and we merely had 
her word for the existence of a husband, who dealt 
in poultry. Without seeing Giovanna's husband, I 
nevertheless knew him to be a man of downy ex- 
terior, wearing a canvas apron, thickly crusted with 



118 VENETIAN LIFE. 

the gore of fowls, who sat at tlie door of his shop 
and phicked chickens forever, as with the tireless 
hand of Fate. I divined that he lived in an at- 
mosphere of scalded pullet ; that three earthen cups 
of clotted chickens' blood, placed upon his window- 
shelf, formed his idea of an attractive display, and 
that he shadowed forth his conceptions of the beau- 
tiful in symmetrical rows of plucked chickens, pre- 
senting to the public eye rear views embellished 
with a single feather erect in the tail of each bird ; 
that he must be, through the ethics of competition, 
the sworn foe of those illogical peasants who bring 
dead poultry to town in cages, like singing birds, 
and equally the friend of those restaurateurs who 
furnish you a meal of victuals and a feather-bed in 
the same mezzo -poZZo arrosto. He turned out on 
actual appearance to be all I had prefigured him, 
with the additional merit of having a large red nose, 
a sidelong, fugitive gait, and a hangdog countenance. 
He furnished us poultry at rates slightly advanced, 
I think. 

As for the boy, he turned up after a while as a 
constant guest, and took possession of the kitchen. 
He came near banishment at one time for catching 
a large number of sea-crabs in the canal, and con- 
fining them in a basket in the kitchen, which they 
left at the dead hour of night, to wander all over 
our house, — making a mysterious and alarming 
sound of snapping, like an army of death-watches, 
and eluding the cunningest efforts at capture. On 
another occasion, he fell into the canal before our 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 119 

house, and terrified iis by going under twice before 
the arrival of the old gondolier, who called out to 
him '^ Petta! petta ! " (Wait ! wait !) as he placidly 
pushed his boat to the spot. Developing other dis- 
agreeable traits, Beppi was finally driven into exile, 
from which he nevertheless furtively returned on 
holidays. 

The family of Giovanna thus gradually encroach- 
ing upon us, we came also to know her mother, — a 
dread and loathly old lady, whom we would willingly 
have seen burned at the stake for a witch. She 
was commonly encountered at nightfall in our street, 
where she lay in wait, as it were, to prey upon the 
frao;rance of dinner driftino; from the kitchen win- 
dows of our neighbor, the Duchess of Parma. Here 
was heard the voice of cooks and of scullions, and 
the ecstasies of helpless voracity in which we some- 
times beheld this old lady were fearful to witness. 
Nor did we find her more comfortable in our own 
kitchen, where we often saw her. The place itself 
is weird and terrible — low ceiled, with the stone 
hearth built far out into the room, and the melo- 
dramatic implements of Venetian cookery dangling 
tragically from the wall. Here is no every-day 
cheerfulness of cooking -range, but grotesque and- 
irons wadino; into the bristlino; embers, and a Ion or 
crane with villanous pots gibbeted upon it. When 
Giovanna's mother, then (of the Italian hags, hag- 
gard), rises to do us reverence from the darkest cor- 
ner of this kitchen, and croaks her good wishes for 
our long life, continued health, and endless happiness, 



120 VENETIAN LIFE. 

it has the effect upon our spirits of the darkest mal- 
ediction. 

Not more pleasing, though altogether hghter and 
cheerfuler, was Giovanna's sister-in-law, whom we 
knew only as the Cognata. Making her appearance 
first upon the occasion of Giovanna's sickness, she 
slowly but surely established herself as an habitual 
presence, and threatened at one time, as we fancied, 
to become our paid servant. But a happy calamity 
which one night carried off a carpet and the win- 
dow curtains of an unoccupied room, cast an evil 
suspicion upon the Cognata, and she never ap- 
peared after the discovery of the theft. We sus- 
pected her of having invented some dishes of which 
we were very fond, and we hated her for oppressing 
us with a sense of many surreptitious favors. Ob- 
jectively, she was a slim, hoopless little woman, with 
a tendency to be always at the street-door when we 
opened it. She had a narrow, narrow face, with 
eyes of terrible slyness, an applausive smile, and a 
demeanor of slavish patronage. Our kitchen, after 
her addition to the household, became the banquet- 
ing-hall of Giovanna's family, who dined there every 
day upon dishes of fish and garlic, that gave the 
house the general savor of a low cook-shop. 

As for Giovanna herself, she had the natural ten- 
dency of excellent people to place others in subjection. 
Our servitude at first was not hard, and consisted 
chiefly in the stimulation of appetite to extraordinary 
efforts when G. had attempted to please us- with some 
novelty in cooking. She held us to a strict account 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 121 

in this respect ; but indeed our applause was for the 
most part wilhng enough. Her culinary execution, 
first revealing itself in a noble rendering of our ideas 
of roast potatoes, — a delicacy foreign to the Vene- 
tian kitchen, — culminated at last in the same style 
o? polpetti^ which furnished forth the table of our 
neighbor, the Duchess, and was a perpetual triumph 
with us. 

But G.'s spirit was not wholly that of the serving- 
woman. We noted in her the liveliness of wit sel- 
dom absent from the Italian poor. She was a great 
babbler, and talked willingly to herself, and to inan- 
imate things, when there w^as no other chance for 
talk. She was profuse in maledictions of bad weather, 
which she held up to scorn as that dog of a weather. 
The crookedness of the fuel transported her, and 
she upbraided the fagots as springing from races of 
ugly old curs. (The vocabulary of Venetian abuse 
is inexhaustible, and the Venetians invent and com- 
bine terms of opprobrium wdth endless facility, but 
all abuse begins and ends with the attribution of dog- 
gishness.) The conscription was held in the campo 
near us, and G. declared the place to have become 
unendurable — '' propria un campo di sospiri ! " 
(Really a field of sighs.) ^^ Stag a comodo!^^ she said 
to a guest of ours who w^ould have moved his chair 
to let her pass between him and the wall. " Don't 
move ; the way to Paradise is not wider than this." 

=^ I confess a tenderness for this dish, which is a deUcater kind 
of hash skillfully flavored and baked in rolls of a mellow com- 
plexion and fascinating appearance. 



122 VENETIAN LIFE. 

We sometimes lamented that Giovanna, who did 
not sleep in the house, should come to us so late in 
the morning, but we could not deal harshly with her 
on that account, met, as we always were, with plen- 
tiful and admirable excuses. Who were we, indeed, 
to place our wishes in the balance against the wel- 
fare of the sick neighbor with whom Giovanna 
passed so many nights of vigil ? Should we re- 
proach her with tardiness when she had not closed 
the eye all night for a headache properly of the 
devil ? If she came late in the morning, she stayed 
late at night ; and it sometimes happened that when 
the Paron and Parona, supposing her gone, made a 
stealthy expedition to the kitchen for cold chicken, 
they found her there at midnight in the fell company 
of the Cognata, bibbing the wine of the country and 
holding a mild Italian revel with that vinegar and 
the stony bread of Venice. 

I have said G. was the flower of serving-women ; 
and so at first she seemed, and it was long till we 
doubted her perfection. We knew ourselves to be 
very young, and weak, and unworthy. The Parona 
had the rare gift of learning to speak less and less 
Italian every day, and fell inevitably into subjection. 
The Paron in a domestic point of view was naturally 
nothing. It had been strange indeed if Giovanna, 
beholding the great contrast we presented to herself 
in many respects, had forborne to abuse her advan- 
tage over us. But we trusted her implicitly, and 
I hardly know how or when it was that we be- 
gan to waver in our confidence. It is- certain that 



HOUSEKEEPING IN VENICE. 123 

with the lapse of time we came gradually to have 
breakfast at twelve o'clock, instead of nine, as we 
had originally appointed it, and that G. grew to con- 
sume the greater part of the day in making our 
small purchases, and to give us our belated dinners 
at seven o'clock. We protested, and temporary re- 
forms ensued, only to be succeeded by more hopeless 
lapses ; but it was not till all entreaties and threats 
failed that we began to think seriously it would be 
well to have done with Giovanna, as an unprofitable 
servant. I give the result, not all the nice causes from 
which it came. But the question was. How to get 
rid of a poor woman and a civil, and the mother of a 
family dependent in great part upon her labor ? We 
solemnly resolve a hundred times to dismiss G., and 
we shrink a hundred times from inflicting the blow. 
At last, somewhat in the spirit of Charles Lamb's 
Chinaman who invented roast pig, and discovered 
that the sole method of roasting it was to burn down 
a house in order to consume the adjacent pig-sty, 
and thus cook the roaster in the flames, — we hit 
upon an artifice by which we could dispense with 
Giovanna, and keep an easy conscience. We had 
long ceased to dine at home, in despair ; and now we 
resolved to take another house, in which there were 
other servants, /jut even then, it was a sore strug- 
gle to part wXii the flower of serving-women, who 
was set over the vacated house to put it in order 
after our flitting, and with whom the imprudent Pa- 
ron settled the last account in the familiar little din- 
ing-room, surrounded by the depressing influences 
of the em}>ty chambers. The place was peopled 



124 VENETIAN LIFE. 

after all, though we had left it, and I think the ten- 
ants who come after us will be haunted by our spec- 
tres, crowding them on the pleasant little balcony, 
and sittino; down with them at table. G. stood there, 
the genius of the place, and wept six regretful tears, 
each one of which drew a florin from the purse of 
the Paron. She had hoped to remain with us al- 
ways wdiile we lived in Venice ; but now that she 
could no longer look to us for support, the Lord must 
take care of her. The gush of grief was transient : 
it relieved her, and she came out sunnily a moment 
after. The Paron went his way more sorrowfully, 
taking leave at last w^ith the fine burst of Christian 
philosophy : '' We are none of us masters of our- 
selves in this world, and cannot do what we wish. 
Ma! Come si fa? Ci vuol pazienza ! ""^ Yet he 
was undeniably lightened in heart. He had cut 
adrift from old moorino;s, and had crossed the Grand 
Canal. G. did not follow him, nor any of the long 
line of pensioners who used to come on certain feast- 
days to levy tribute of eggs at the old house. (The 
postman was among these, on Christmas and New 
Year's, and as he received eggs at every house, it 
was a problem with us, unsolved to this hour, how 
he carried them all, and what he did with them.) 
Not the least among the Paron's causes for self-grat- 
ulation was the non-appearance at his new abode of 
two local newspapers, for which in an evil hour he 
subscribed, which Avere delivered with unsparing 
regularity, and which, being never read, formed the 
keenest reproach of his imprudent outlay and his idle 
neglect of their contents. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL. 

The history of Venice reads like a romance ; the 
place seems a fantastic vision at the best, from which 
the world must at last awake some morning, and find 
that after all it has only been dreaming, and that 
there never was any such city. There our race seems 
to be in earnest in nothing. People sometimes work, 
but as if without any aim ; they suffer, and you fancy 
them playing at wretchedness. The Church of St. 
Mark, standing so solidly, w^ith a thousand years 
under the feet of its innumerable pillars, is not in 
the least gray with time — no grayer than a Greek 

lyric. 

" All has suffered a sea-change 
Into something rich and strange/' 

in this fantastic city. The prose of earth has risen 
poetry from its baptism in the sea. 

And if, living constantly in Venice, you sometimes 
for a little while forget how marvelous she is, at any 
moment you may be startled into vivid remembrance. 
The cunning city beguiles you street by street, and 
step by step, into some old court, where a flight of 
marble stairs leads high up to the pillared gallery of an 
empty palace, with a climbing vine green and purple 



126 VENETIAN LIFE. 

on its old decay, and one or two gaunt trees stretch- 
ing their heads to look into the lofty windows, — blind 
long ago to their leafy tenderness, — while at their 
* feet is some sumptuously carven well, with the beauty 
of the sculptor's soul wrought forever into the stone. 
Or Venice lures you in a gondola into one of her re- 
mote canals, where you glide through an avenue as 
secret and as still as if sea-deep under our work-day 
world ; where the grim heads carven over the water- 
gates of the palaces stare at you in austere surprise ; 
where the innumerable balconies are full of the 
Absences of gay cavaliers and gentle dames, gossip- 
ing and making love to one another, from their airy 
perches. Or if the city's mood is one of bolder 
charm, she fascinates you in the very places where 
you think her power is the weakest, and as if impa- 
tient of your forgetfulness, dares a w^ilder beauty, 
and enthralls with a yet more unearthly and incred- 
ible enchantment. It is in the Piazza, and the Aus- 
trian band is playing, and the promenaders pace sol- 
emnly up and down to the music, and the gentle 
4,p«Jtalian loafers at Florian's brood vacantlv over their 
little cups of coffee, and nothing can be more stupid ; 
when suddenly every thing is changed, and a memor- 
able tournament flashes up in many-glittering action 
upon the scene, and there upon the gallery of the 
church, before the horses of bronze, sit the Senators, 
bright-robed, and in the midst the bonneted Doge 
with his guest Petrarch at his side. Or the old 
Carnival, which had six months of every year to riot 
in, comes back and throngs the place with motley 



THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL. 127 

company, — dominoes, harlequins, pantaloni, illustris- 
simi and illustrissime, and perhaps even the Doge 
himself, who has the right of incognito when he 
wears a little mask of wax at his button-hole. Or 
may be the grander day revisits Venice when Doria 
has sent word from his fleet of Genoese at Chioggia 
that he will listen to the Senate when he has bridled 
the horses of Saint Mark, — and the whole Republic 
of rich and poor crowds the square, demanding the 
release of Pisani, who comes forth from his prison 
to create victory from the dust of the crumbling 
commonwealth. 

But whatever surprise of memorable or beautiful 
Venice may prepare for your forgetfulness, be sure it 
w^ill be complete and resistless. Nay, what potenter 
magic needs my Venice to revivify her past when- 
ever she will, than the serpent cunning of her Grand 
Canal? Launched upon this great S have I not 
seen hardened travelers grow sentimental, and has 
not this prodigious sybillant, in my hearing, inspired 
w^hite-haired Puritan ministers of the gospel to at- 
tempt to quote out of the guide-book " that line 
from Byron " ? Upon my word, I have sat beside 
wandering editors in their gondolas, and witnessed 
the expulsion of the newspaper from their nature, 
while, lulled by the fascination of the place, they 
were powerless to take their own journals from their 
pockets, and instead of poHtics talked some bewil- 
dered nonsense about coming back with their fami- 
lies next summer. For myself, I must count as 
half-lost the year spent in Venice before I took a 



128 VENETIAN LIFE. 

house upon the Grand Canal. There alone can ex- 
istence have the perfect local flavor. But by what 
witchery touched one's being suffers the common 
sea-change, till life at last seems to ebb and flow w^ith 
the tide in that wonder-avenue of palaces, it w^ould be 
idle to attempt to tell. I can only take you to our dear 
little balcony at Casa Falier, and comment not very 
coherently on the scene upon the water under us. 

And I am sure (since it is either in the spring or 
the fall) you will not be surprised to see, the first 
thing, a boat-load of those English, who go by from 
the station to their hotels, every day, in well-freighted 
gondolas. These parties of traveling Englishry are 
all singularly alike, from the " Pa'ty " traveling 
alone with his opera-glass and satchel, to the party 
which fills a gondola with well-cushioned English 
middle age, ruddy English youth, and substantial ^^ 
English baggage. We have learnt to know them 
all very well : the father and the mother sit upon 
the back seat, and their comely girls at the sides and 
front. These girls all have the honest cabbage-roses 
of English health upon their cheeks ; they all wear 
little rowdy English hats, and invariable waterfalls 
of hair tumble upon their broad English backs. 
They are coming from Switzerland and Germany, 
and they are going south to Rome and to Naples, 
and they always pause at Venice a few days. To- 
morrow we shall see them in the Piazza, and at Flo- 
rian's, and St. Mark's, and the Ducal Palace ; and the 
young ladies will cross the Bridge of Sighs, and will 
sentimentally feed the vagabond pigeons of St. Mark j 



THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL. 129 

winch loaf about the Piazza and defile the sculptures. 
But now our travelers are themselves very hungry, 
and are more anxious than Americans can understand 
about the table-d'hote of their hotel. It is perfectly 
certain that if they fall into talk there with any of 
our nation, the respectable English father will re- 
mark that this w^ar in America is a very sad war^ 
and will ask to know when it will all end. The 
truth is, Americans do not like these people, and I 
believe there is no love lost on the other side. Btit, 
in many things, they, are travelers to be honored, if 
not liked : they voyage through all countries, and 
without awaking fervent affection in any land through 
which they pass ; but their sterling honesty and 
truth have made the English tongue a draft upon the 
unlimited confidence of the continental peoples, and 
-French, Germans, and Italians trust and respect 
private English faith as cordially as they hate public 
English perfidy. 

They come to Venice chiefly in the autumn, and 
October is the month of the Sunsets and the Eng- 
lish. The former are best seen from the Public 
Gardens, whence one looks westward, and beholds^ 
them glorious behind the domes and towers of San. 
Giorgio Maggiore and the church of the Redentore. 
Sometimes, when the sky is clear, your sunset on 
the lagoon is a fine thing ; for then the sun goes 
dow^n into the water with a broad trail of bloody 
red behind him, as if, wounded far out at sea, he 
had dragged himself landward across the crimson- 
ing expanses, and fallen and died' as he reached 

9 



130 VENETIAN LIFE. 

the land. But we (upon whom the idleness of 
Venice grows daily, and from whom the Gardens, 
therefore, grow farther and farther) are commonly 
content to take our bit of sunset as we get it from 
our balcony, through the avenue opened by the nar- 
row canal opposite. We like the earlier afternoon 
to have been a little rainy, when we have our sunset 
splendid as the fary of a passionate beauty — all 
tears and fire. There is a pretty but impertinent 
little palace on the corner which is formed by this 
canal as it enters the Canalazzo, and from the palace, 
high over the smaller channel, hangs an airy bal- 
cony. When the sunset sky, under and over the 
balcony, is of that pathetic and angry red which I 
have tried to figure, we think ourselves rich in the 
neighborhood of that part of the '' Palace of Art," 
whereon 

" The light aerial gallery, golden railed, 
Burnt like a fringe of fire." 

And so, after all, we do not think we have lost any 
greater thing in not seeing the sunset from the Gar- 
dens, where half a dozen artists are always painting 
it, or from the quay of the Zattere, where it is splen- 
did over and under the island church of San Giorgio 
in Alga. 

It is only the English and the other tourist stran- 
gers who go by upon the Grand Canal during the 
day. But in the hours just before the summer twi- 
light the gondolas of the citizens appear, and then 
you may see whatever is left of Venetian gayety, 



THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL. 131 

and looking down upon the groups in the open gon- 
dolas may witness something of the home-hfe of the 
Italians, who live out-of-doors. 

The groups do not vary a great deal one from an- 
other : inevitably the pale-faced papa, the fat mamma, 
the over-dressed handsome young girls. We learned 
to look for certain gondolas, and grew^ to feel a fond 
interest in a very mild young man who took the air 
in company and contrast with a ferocious bull-dog 
— boule-dogue he called him, I suppose. He was 
always smoking languidly, that mild young man, 
and I fancied I could read in his countenance a 
gentle, gentle antagonism to life — the proportionate 
Byronic misanthropy, which might arise from sugar 
and water taken instead of gin. But we really knew 
nothing about him, and our conjecture was conject- 
ure. Officers w^ent by in their brilliant uniforms, 
and gave the scene an alien splendor. Among these 
w^e enjoyed best the spectacle of an old major, or 
perhaps general, in whom the arrogance of youth 
had stiffened into a chill hauteur, and who frowned 
above his gray overwhelming moustache upon the 
passers, like a citadel grim with battle and age. 
We used to fancy, with a certain luxurious sense of 
our own safety, that one broadside from those for- 
tressed eyes could blow from the water the slight 
pleasure-boats in which the young Venetian idlers 
were innocently disporting. But again this was 
merely conjecture. The general's glance may have 
had no such power. Indeed, the furniture of our 
apartment sustained no damage from it, even when 



132 VENETIAN LIFE. 

concentrated through an opera-glass, by which means 
the brave officer at times perused our humble lodg- 
ing from the balcony of his own over against us. 
He may have been no more dangerous in his way 
than two aged sisters (whom we saw every evening) 
were in theirs. They represented Beauty in its 
most implacable and persevering form, and perhaps 
they had one day been belles and could not forget it. 
They were very old indeed, but their dresses were 
new and their paint fresh, and as they glided by in 
the good-natured twilight, one had no heart to smile 
at them. We gave our smiles, and now and then 
our soldi, to the swarthy beggar, who, being short of 
legs, rowed up and down the canal in a boat, and 
overhauled Charity in the gondolas. He was a sin- 
gular compromise, in his vocation and his equipment, 
betw^een the mendicant and corsair : I fear he would 
not have hesitated to assume the pirate altogether 
in lonelier waters ; and had I been a heavily laden 
oyster-boat returning by night through some remote 
and dark canal, I would have steered clear of that 
truculent-looking craft, of which the crew must have 
fought with a desperation proportioned to the lack 
of legs and the difficulty of running away, in case of 
defeat. 

About nightfall came the market boats on their 
way to the Rialto market, bringing heaped fruits and 
vegetables from the main-land ; and far into the 
night the soft dip of the oar, and the gurgling prog- 
ress of the boats was company and gentlest lullaby. 
By which time, if w6 looked out again, we found the 



THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL. 133 

moon risen, and the ghost of dead Venice shadowily 
happy in haunting the lonesome palaces, and the sea, 
which had so loved Venice, kissing and caressing the 
tide- worn marble steps where her feet seemed to rest. 
At night sometimes we saw from our balcony one 
of \ho^Q freschi^ which once formed the chief splen- 
dor of festive occasions in Venice, and are peculiar 
to the city, where alone their fine effects are possible. 
The fresco is a procession of boats with music and 
lights. Two immense barges, illumined with hun- 
dreds of paper lanterns, carry the military bands ; 
the boats of the civil and military dignitaries follow, 
and then the gondolas of such citizens as choose to 
take part in the display, — though since 1859 no 
Italian, unless a government official, has been seen in 
the procession. No gondola has less than two lan- 
terns, and many have eight or ten, shedding mellow 
lights of blue, and red, and purple, over uniforms 
and silken robes. The soldiers of the bands breathe 
from their instruments music the most perfect and 
exquisite of its kind in the world ; and as the pro- 
cession takes the width of the Grand Canal in its 
magnificent course, soft crimson flushes play upon 
the old, weather- darkened palaces, and die tenderly 
away, giving to light and then to shadow the opu- 
lent sculptures of pillar, and arch, and spandrel, 
and weirdly illuminating the grim and bearded vis- 
ages of stone that peer down from doorway and win- 
dow. It is a sight more gracious and fairy than ever 
poet dreamed ; and I feel that the lights and the 
nmsic have only got into my description by name, 



134 VENETIAN LIFE. 

and that yoa would not know them when you saw 
and heard them, from any thing I say. In other 
days, people tell you, the fresco was much more im- 
pressive than now. At intervals, rockets used to be 
sent up, and the Bengal lights, burned during the 
progress of the boats, threw the gondoliers' spectral 
shadows, giant-huge, on the palace- walls. But, for 
my part, I do not care to have the fresco other than 
I know it : indeed, for my ow^n selfish pleasure, I 
should be sorry to nave Venice in any way less fallen 
and forlorn than she is. 

Without doubt the most picturesque craft ever 
seen on the Grand Canal are the great boats of the 
river Po, which, crossing the lagoons from Chioggia, 
come up to the city with the swelling sea. They 
are built with a pointed stern and bow rising w^ith 
the sweep of a short curve from the w^ater high 
above the cabin roof, which is always covered with 
a straw matting. Black is not the color of the gon- 
dolas alone, but of all boats in Venetia ; and these 
of the Po are like immense funeral barges, and any 
one of them mio;ht be sent to take Kino; Arthur and 
bear him to Avilon, whither I think most of them 
are bound. A path runs along either gunwale, on 
which the men pace as they pole the boat up the 
canal, — her great sail folded and lying with the pros- 
trate mast upon the deck. The rudder is a pro- 
digious affair, and the man at the helm is commonly 
kind enough to w^ear a red cap with a blue tassel, 
and to smoke. The other persons on board are not 
less obliging and picturesque, from the dark-eyed 



THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL. 135 

young mother who sits with her child in her arms 
at the cabin-door, to the bronze boy who figures in 
play at her feet with a small yellow dog of the race 
already noticed in charge of the fuel-boats from Dal- 
matia. The father of the family, whom we take to 
be the commander of the vessel, occupies himself 
gracefully in sitting down and gazing at the babe 
and its mother. It is an old habit of mine, formed 
in childhood from looking at rafts upon the Ohio, 
to attribute, with a kind of heart-ache, supreme 
earthly happiness to the navigators of lazy river 
craft ; and as we glance down upon these people 
from our balcony, I choose to think them immensely 
contented, and try, in a feeble, tacit way, to make 
friends with so much bliss. But I am always re- 
pelled in these advances by the small yellow dog, 
who is rendered extremely irascible by my contem- 
plation of the boat under his care, and who, ruffling 
his hair as a hen ruffles her feathers, never fails to 
bark furious resentment of my longing. 

Far different from the picture presented by this 
boat's progress — the peacefulness of which even 
the bad temper of the small yellow dog could not 
mar — was another scene w^hich we witnessed upon 
the Grand Canal, when one morning we were roused 
from our breakfast by a wild and lamentable outcry. 
Two large boats, attempting to enter the small canal 
opposite at the same time, had struck together with 
a violence that shook the boatmen to their inmost 
souls. One barge was laden with lime, and belonged 
to a plasterer of the city ; the other was full of fuel, 



136 VENETIAN LIFE. 

and commanded by a virulent rustic. These rival 

captains advanced toward the bows of their boats, 

with murderous looks, 

" Con la test' alta e con rabbiosa fame, 
Si che parea che Taer ne temesse," 

and there stamped furiously, and beat the wind with 
hands of deathful challenge, while I looked on with 
that noble interest which the enlightened mind al- 
ways feels in people about to punch each other's heads. 

But the storm burst in words. 

*' Figure of a pig ! " shrieked the Venetian, " you 
have ruined my boat forever ! " 

" Thou liest, son of an ugly old dog ! " returned 
the countryman, " and it was my right to enter the 
canal first." 

They then, after this exchange of insult, aban- 
doned the main subject of dispute, and took up the 
quarrel laterally and in detail. Reciprocally ques- 
tioning the reputation of all their female relatives to 
the third and fourth cousins, they defied each other 
as the offspring of assassins and prostitutes. As 
the peace-making tide gradually drifted their boats 
asunder, their anger rose, and they danced back and 
forth and hurled opprobrium with a foamy volubility 
that quite left my powers of comprehension behind. 
At last the townsman, executing a pas seul of un- 
common violence, stooped and picked up a bit of 
lime, while the countryman, taking shelter at the 
stern of his boat, there a4;tended the shot. To my 
infinite disappointment it was not fired. The Vene- 
tian seemed to have touched the climax of his pas- 



THE BALCONY ON THE GRAND CANAL. 137 

sion in the mere demonstration of hostility, and 
gently gathering up his oar gave the countryman 
the right of way. The courage of the latter rose as 
the danger passed, and as far as he could be heard, 
he continued to exult in the wildest excesses of in- 
sult : '' Ah-heigh ! brutal executioner ! Ah, hid- 
eous headsman 1 " Da capo. I now know that these 
people never intended to do more than quarrel, and 
no doubt they parted as well pleased as if they had 
actually carried broken heads from the encounter. 
But at the time I felt affronted and trifled with by 
the result, for my disappointments arising out of the 
dramatic manner of the Italians had not yet been fre- 
quent enough to teach me to expect nothing from it. 
There was some compensation for me — coming, 
like all compensation, a long while after the loss — in 
the spectacle of a funeral procession on the Grand 
Canal, which had a singular and imposing solemnity 
only possible to the place. It was the funeral of an 
Austrian general, whose coffin, mounted on a sable 
eatafalco, was borne upon the middle boat of three 
that moved abreast. The barges on either side 
bristled with the bayonets of soldiery, but the dead 
man was alone in his boat, except for one strange 
figure that stood at the head of the coffin, and 
rested its glittering hand upon the black fall of the 
drapery. Tliis was a man clad cap-a-pie in a perfect 
suit of gleaming mail, with his visor down, and his 
shoulders swept by the heavy raven plumes of his 
helm. As at times he moved from side to side, and 
glanced upward at the old palaces, sad in the yellow 



138 VENETIAN LIFE. 

morning light, he put out of sight, for me, every- 
thing else upon the Canal, and seemed the ghost of 
some crusader come back to Venice, in wonder if 
this city, lying dead under the hoofs of the Croat, 
were indeed that same haughty Lady of the Sea 
who had once sent her blind old Doge to beat down 
the pride of an empire and disdain its crown. 



CHAPTER IX. 

A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE. 

One summer morning the mosquitoes played for 
me with sleep, and won. It was half-past four, and 
as it had often been my humor to see Venice at 
that hour, I got up and sallied forth for a stroll 
through the city. 

This morning walk did not lay the foundation of a 

habit of early rising in me, but I nevertheless advise 

people always to get up at half-past four, if they 

wish to receive the most vivid impressions, and to 

take the most absorbing interest in every thing in 

the world. It was wdth a feeling absolutely novel 

that I looked about me that morning, and there was 

a breezy freshness and clearness in my perceptions 

altogether delightful, and I fraternized so cordially 

with Nature that I do not think, if I had sat down 

immediately after to write out the experience, I 

should have at all patronized her, as I am afraid 

scribbling people have sometimes the custom to do. 

I know that my feeling of brotherhood in the case 

of two sparrows, which obliged me by hopping 

down from a garden wall at the end of Calle Falier 

and promenading on the pavement, was quite humble 

and sincere ; and that I resented the ill-nature of 

a cat, 

** Whom love kept wakeful and the muse," 



140 VENETIAN LIFE. 

and who at that hour was spitefully reviling the 
morn from a window grating. As I went by the 
gate of the Canonico's little garden, the flowers 
saluted me with a breath of perfume, — I think the 
white honeysuckle was first to offer me this polite- 
ness, — and the dumpy little statues looked far more 
engaging than usual. 

After passing the bridge, the first thing to do was 
to drink a cup of coffee at the Caff^ Ponte di Ferro, 
where the eyebrows of the waiter expressed a mild 
surprise at my early presence. There was no one 
else in the place but an old gentleman talking 
thoughtfully to himself on the subject of two florins, 
while he poured his coffee into a glass of water, 
before drinking it. As I lingered a moment over 
my cup, I was reinforced by the appearance of a 
company of soldiers, marching to parade in the 
Campo di Marte. Their officers went at their head, 
laugliing and chatting, and one of the lieutenants 
smoking a long pipe, gave me a feeling o£ satisfaction 
only comparable to that which I experienced shortly 
afterward in beholding a stoutly built small dog on 
the Ponte di San Mois^. The creature was only a 
few inches high, and it must have been through some 
mist of dreams yet hanging about me that he im- 
pressed me as having something elephantine in his 
manner. When I stooped down and patted him on 
the head, I felt colossal. 

On my way to the Piazza, I stopped in the 
church of Saint Mary of the Lily, where, in company 
with one other sinner, I found a relish in the early 



A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE. 141 

sacristan's deliberate manner of lighting the candles 
on the altar. Saint Mary of the Lily has a fagade 
in the taste of the declining Renaissance. The in- 
terior is in perfect keeping, and all is hideous, 
abominable, and abandoned. My fellow-sinner was 
kneeling, arid repeating his prayers. He now and 
then tapped himself abs^t-mindedly on the breast 
and forehead, and gave a good deal of his attention 
to me as I stood at the door, hat in hand. The 
hour and the place invested him with so much in- 
terest, that I parted from him with emotion. My 
feelings were next involved by an abrupt separa- 
tion from a young English East-Indian, whom 1 
overheard asking the keeper of a caffe his way to the 
Campo di Marte. He was a claret-colored young 
fellow, tall, and wearing folds of white muslin around 
his hat. In another world I trust to know how he 
liked the parade that morning. 

I discovered that Piazza San Marco is every 
morning swept by troops of ragged facchini, who 
gossip noisily and quarrelsomely together over their 
work. Boot-blacks, also, were in attendance, and 
several followed my progress through the square, in 
the vague hope that I would relent and have my 
boots blacked. One peerless waiter stood alone 
amid the desert elegance of CaffS Florian, which is 
never shut, day or night, from year to year. At the 
Caffe of the Greeks, two individuals of the Greek 
nation were drinking coffee. 

I went upon the Molo, passing between the pillars 
of the Lion and the Saint, and walked freely back 



142 VENETIAN LIFE. 

and forth, taking in the glory of that prospect of 
water and of vague islands breaking the silver of the 
lagoons, like those scenes cunningly wrought in ap- 
parent relief on old Venetian mirrors. I walked there 
freely, for though thejffe were already many gondo- 
liers at the station, not one took me for a foreigner 
or offered me a boat. At that hour, I was in my- 
self so improbable, that if they saw me at all, I must 
have appeared to them as a dream. My sense of 
security was sweet, but it was false, for on going 
into the church of St. Mark, the keener eye of 
the sacristan detected me. He instantly offered to 
show me the Zeno Chapel ; but I declined, prefer- 
ring the church, where I found the space before the 
high altar filled with market-people come to hear the 
early mass. As I passed out of the church, I wit- 
nessed the partial awaking of a Venetian gentleman 
who had spent the night in a sitting posture, be- 
tween the columns of the main entrance. He looked 
puffy, scornful, and uncomfortable, and at the mo- 
ment of falling back to slumber, tried to smoke an 
unlighted cigarette, which he held between his lips. 
I found none of the shops open as I passed through 
the Merceria, and but for myself, and here and there a 
laborer going to work, the busy thoroughfare seemed 
deserted. In the mere wantonness of power, and 
the security of solitude, I indulged myself in snap- 
ping several door-latches, which gave nje a pleasure 
as keen as that enjoyed in boyhood from passing a 
stick along the pickets of a fence. I was in nowis^e 
abashed to be discovered in this amusement by an 



A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE. 143 

old peasant-woman, bearing at either end of a yoke 
the usual basket with bottles of milk packed in 
straw. 

Entering Campo San Bartolomeo, I found trade 
ah^eady astir in that noisy place ; the voice of cheap 
bargains, which by noonday swells into an intoler- 
able uproar, was beginning to be heard. Having 
Hved in Campo San Bartolomeo, I recognized several 
familiar faces there, and particularly noted among 
them that of a certain fruit-vender, who frequently 
swindled me in my small dealings with him. He 
now sat before his stand, and for a man of a fat and 
greasy presence, looked very fresh and brisk, and as 
if he had passed a pleasant night. 

On the other side of the Rialto Bridge, the mar- 
ket was preparing for the purchasers. Butchers 
were arranging their shops ; fruit-stands, and stands 
for the sale of crockery, and — as I must say for 
want of a better word, if there is any — notions, were 
in a state of tasteful readiness. The person on the 
steps of the bridge who had exposed his stock of 
cheap clothing and coarse felt hats on the parapet, 
had so far completed his preparations as to have leis- 
ure to be talking himself hot and hoarse with the 
neighboring barber. He was in a perfectly good 
humor, and was merely giving a dramatic flavor to 
some question of six soldi. 

At the landings of the market-place squadrons of 
boats loaded with vegetables were arriving and un- 
loading. Peasants were building cabbages into 
pyramids ; collective squashes and cucumbers were 



144 VENETIAN LIFE. 

taking a picturesque shape ; wreaths of garlic and 
garlands of onions graced the scene. All the people 
were clamoring at the tops of their voices ; and in 
the midst of the tumult and confusion, resting on 
heaps of cabbage-leaves and garbage, men lay on 
their bellies sweetly sleeping. Numbers of eating- 
houses were sending forth a savory smell, and every- 
where were breakfasters with bowls of sguassetto. In 
one of the shops, somewhat prouder than the rest, 
a heated brunette was turning sections of eel on a 
gridiron, and hurriedly coqueting with the pur- 
chasers. Singularly calm amid all this bustle was the 
countenance of the statue called the Gobbo, as I 
looked at it in the centre of the market-place. The 
Gobbo (who is not a hunchback, either) was pa- 
tiently supporting his burden, and looking with a 
quiet, thoughtful frown upon the ground, as if pon- 
dering some dream of change that had come to him 
since the statutes of the haughty Republic were read 
aloud to the people from the stone tribune on his 
shoulders. 

Indeed, it was a morning for thoughtful medita- 
tion ; and as I sat at the feet of the four granite 
kings shortly after, waiting for the gate of the ducal 
palace to be opened, that I might see the girls draw- 
ing the water, I studied the group of the Judgment 
of Solomon, on the corner of the palace, and arrived 
at an entirely new interpretation of that Bible story, 
which I have now wholly forgotten. 

The gate remained closed too long for my patience, 
and I turned away from a scene momently losing its 



A DAY-BREAK RAMBLE. 145 

interest. The brilliant little shops opened like holly- 
hocks as I went home ; the swelling tide of life 
filled the streets, and brought Venice back to my 
day-time remembrance, robbing her of that keen, 
delightful charm with which she greeted my early 



mormng sense. 



10 



CHAPTER X. 



THE MOUSE. 



Wishing to tell the story of our Mouse, because 
I think it illustrates some amusing traits of character 
in a certain class of Italians, I explain at once that 
he was not a mouse, but a man so called from his 
wretched, trembling little manner, his fugitive ex- 
pression, and peaked visage. 

He first appeared to us on the driver's seat of 
that carriage in which we posted so splendidly one 
spring-time from Padua to Ponte Lagoscuro. But 
though he mounted to his place just outside the 
city gate, we did not regard him much, nor, indeed, 
observe what a mouse he was, until the driver 
stopped to water his horses near Battaglia, and the 
Mouse got down to stretch his forlorn little legs. 
Then I got down too, and bade him good-day, and 
told him it was a very hot day — for he was a 
mouse apparently so plunged in wretchedness that 
I doubted if he knew what kind of day it was. 

When I had spoken, he began to praise (in the 
wary manner of the Venetians when they find them- 
selves in the company of a foreigner w^ho does not 
look like an Englishman) the Castle of the Obizzi 
near by, which is now the country-seat of the ex- 



THE MOUSE. 147 

Duke of Modena ; and he presently said something 
to imply that he thought me a German. 

" But I am not a German," said I. 

" As many excuses," said the Mouse sadly, but 
with evident relief; and then began to talk more 
freely, and of the evil times. 

'' Are you going all the way with us to Flor- 
ence? " I asked. 

" No, signer, to Bologna ; from there to Ancona." 

'' Have you ever been in Venice ? We are just 
coming from there." 

" Oh, yes." 

" It is a beautiful place. Do you like it ? " 

'' Sufficiently. But one does not enjoy himself 
very well there." 

" But I thought Venice interesting." 

" Sufficiently, signer. 3Ia ! " said the Mouse, 
shrugging his shoulders, and putting on the air of 
being luxuriously fastidious in his choice of cities, 
" the water is so bad in Venice." 

The Mouse is dressed in a heavy winter over- 
coat, and has no garment to form a compromise 
with his shirt-sleeves, if he should wish to render 
the weather more endurable by throwing off the 
surtout. In spite of his momentary assumption 
of Qonsequence, I suspect that his coat is in the 
Monte di Pieta. It comes out directly that he is a 
ship-carpenter who has worked in the Arsenal of 
Venice, and at the ship-yards in Trieste. 

But there is no work any more. He went to 
Trieate lately to get a job on the three frigates 



148 YENETIAN LIFE. 

which the Sultan had ordered to be built there. 
Ma ! After all, the frigates are to be built in Mar- 
seilles instead. There is nothing. And every thing 
is so dear. In Venetia you spend much and gain 
little. Perhaps there is work at Ancona. 

By this time the horses are watered ; the 
Mouse regains his seat, and w^e almost forget him, 
till he jumps from his place, just before we reach 
the hotel in Rovigo, and disappears — down the 
first hole in the side of a house, perhaps. He 
might have done much worse, and spent the night 
at the hotel, as we did. 

The next morning at four o'clock, when we start, 
he is on the box again, nibbling bread and cheese, 
and glancing furtively back at us to say good morn- 
ing. He has little twinkling black eyes, just like 
a mouse, and a sharp moustache, and sharp tuft on 
his chin — - as like Victor Emanuel's as a mouse's 
tuft can be. 

The cold morning air seems to shrivel him, and 
he crouches into a little gelid ball on the seat beside 
the driver, while we wind along the Po on the 
smooth gray road ; while the tvvihght lifts slowly 
from the distances of field and vineyard ; while the 
black boats of the Po, with their gaunt white sails, 
show spectrally through the mists ; while the trees 
and the bushes break into innumerable voice, and 
the birds are glad of another day in Italy ; while 
the peasant drives his mellow-eyed, dun oxen afield ; 
w^hile his wife comes in her scarlet bodice to the 
door, and the children's faces peer out from behind 



THE MOUSE. 149 

her skirts ; while the air freshens, the east flushes, 
and the great miracle is wrought anew. 

Once again, before we reach tlie ferry of the Po, 
the Mouse leaps down and disappears as mysteriously 
as at Rovigo* We see him no more till we meet in 
the station on the other side of the river, where we 
hear him bargaining long and earnestly with the 
ticket - seller for a third - class passage to Bologna. 
He fails to get it, I think, at less than the usual 
rate, for he retires from the contest more shrunken 
and forlorn than ever, and walks up and down the 
station, startled at a word, shocked at any sudden 
noise. 

For curiosity, I ask how much he paid for cross- 
ing the river, mentioning the fabulous sum it had 
cost us. 

It appears that he paid sixteen soldi only. 
'* What could they do when a man was in misery ? 
I had nothing else." 

Even while thus betraying his poverty, the 
Mouse did not beg, and we began to respect his 
poverty. In a little while we pitied it, witnessing 
the manner in which he sat down on the edge of a 
chair, with a smile of meek desperation. 

It is a more serious case when an artisan is out of 
work in the Old World than one can understand in 
the New. There the struggle for bread is so fierce 
and the competition so great ; and, then, a man 
bred to one trade cannot turn his hand to another 
as in America. Even the rudest and least skilled 
labor has more to do it tlian are wanted. The 



150 VENETIAN LIFE. 

Italians are very good to the poor, but the trades- 
man out of work must become a beggar before 
charity can help him. 

We, who are poor enough to be wise, consult 
foolishly together concerning the Mouse. It blesses 
him that gives, and him that takes — this business 
of charity. And then, there is something irresist- 
ibly relishing and splendid in the consciousness of 
being the instrument of a special providence ! Have 
I all my life admired those beneficent characters in 
novels and comedies who rescue innocence, succor 
distress, and go about pressing gold into the palm of 
poverty, and telling it to take it and be happy ; and 
now shall I reject an occasion, made to my hand, 
for emulating them in real life ? 

" I think I will give the Mouse five francs," I say. 

*' Yes, certainly." 

" But I will be prudent," I continue. " I will 
not give him this money. I will tell him it is a loan 
which he may pay me back again whenever he can. 
In this way I shall relieve him now, and furnish him 
an incentive to economy." 

I call to the Mouse, and he runs tremulously to- 
ward me. 

'' Have you friends in Ancona ? " 

" No, signer." 

*' How much money have you left ? " 

He shows me three soldi. " Enough for a coffee.'' 

'' And then ? " 

*' God knows." 

So I give him the five francs, and explain my little 



THE MOUSE. 151 

scheme of making it a loan, and not a gift ; and then 
I give him my address. 

He does not appear to understand the scheme of 
the loan ; but he takes the money, and is quite 
stunned by his good fortune. He thanks me ab- 
sently, and goes and shows the piece to the guards, 
with a smile that illumines and transfigures his whole 
person. At Bologna, he has come to his senses ; 
he loads me with blessings, he is ready to weep ; he 
reverences me, he wishes me a good voyage, endless 
prosperity, and innumerable days ; and takes the 
train for Ancona. 

" Ah, ah ! " I congratulate myself, — " is it not a 
fine thing to be the instrument of a special provi- 
dence ? " 

It is pleasant to think of the Mouse during all that 
journey, and if we are never so tired, it rests us to 
say, " I wonder where the Mouse is by this time ? " 
When we get home, and coldly count up our ex- 
penses, we rejoice in the five francs lent to the 
Mouse. " And I know he will pay it back if 
ever he can," I say. " That was a Mouse of in- 
tegrity." 

Two weeks later comes a comely young woman, 
with a young child — a child strong on its legs, a 
child which tries to open every thing in the room, 
which wants to pull the cloth off the tabl'e, to throw 
itself out of the open w^indow — a child of which I 
have never seen the peer for restlessness and curi- 
osity. This young woman has been directed to call 
on me as a person likely to pay her way to Ferrara. 



152 VENETIAN LIFE. 

*' But wlio sent you ? But, in fine, why should I 
pay your way to Ferrara ? I have never seen you 
before." 

" My husband, whom jou benefited on his way to 
Ancona, sent me. Here is his letter and the card 
you gave him." 

I call out to my fellow-victim, — " My dear, here 
is news of the Mouse ! " 

'' Don't tell me he 's sent you that money al- 
ready ! " 

" Not at all. He has sent me his wife and child, 
that I may forward them to him at Ferrara, out of 
my goodness, and the boundless prosperity which has 
followed his good wishes — I, who am a great signer 
in his eyes, and an insatiable giver of five-franc 
pieces — the instrument of a perpetual special prov- 
idence. The Mouse lias found work at Ferrara, and 
his wife comes here from Trieste. As for the rest, 
I am to send her to him, as I said." 

''You are deceived," I say solemnly to the Mouse's 
wife. " I am not a rich man. I lent your husband 
five francs because he had nothing. I am sorry ; 
but I cannot spare twenty florins to send you to 
Ferrara. If one w^ill help you ? " 

" Thanks the same," said the young woman, who 
v/as well dressed enough ; and blessed me, and gath- 
ered up her child, and went her way. 

But her blessing did not lighten my heart, de- 
pressed and troubled by so strange an end to my 
little scheme of a beneficent loan. After all, per- 
haps the Mouse may have been as keenly disap- 



THE MOUSE. 153 

pointed as myself. With the ineradicable idea of the 
Italians, that persons who speak English are wealthy 
by nature, and tutti originali^ it was not such an ab- 
surd conception of the case to suppose that if I had 
lent him five francs once, I should like to do it con- 
tinually. Perhaps he may yet pay back the loan 
with usury. But I doubt it. In the mean time, I 
am far from blaming the Mouse. I merely feel that 
there is a misunderstanding, which I can pardon if 
he can. 



CHAPTER XL 

CHURCHES AND PICTURES. 

One day in the gallery of the Venetian Academy 
a family party of the English, whom we had often 
seen from our balcony in their gondolas, were kind 
enough to pause before Titian's John the Baptist, 
It was attention that the picture could scarcely de- 
mand in strict justice, for it hangs at the end of a 
suite of smaller rooms through which visitors usually 
return from the great halls, spent with looking at 
much larger paintings. As these people stood gazing 
at the sublime figure of the Baptist, — one of the most 
impressive, if not the most religious, that the mas- 
ter has painted, — and the wild and singular beauty 
of the landscape made itself felt through the infinite 
depths of their respectability, the father of the family 
and the head of the group uttered approval of the 
painter's conception : " Quite my idea of the party's 
character," he said ; and then silently and awfully 
led his domestic train away. 

I am so far from deridino; the criticism of this 
honest gentleman that I would wish to have equal 
sincerity and boldness in saying what I thought -- if 
I really thought any thing at all — concerning the art 
which I spent so great a share of my time at Venice 



CHURCHES AND PICTURES. 155 

in looking at. But I fear I should fall short of the 
terseness as well as the candor I applaud, and should 
presently find myself tediously rehearsing criticisms 
which I neither respect for their honesty, nor regard 
for their justice. It is the sad fortune of him who 
desires to arrive at full perception of the true and 
beautiful in art, to find that critics have no agree- 
ment except upon a few loose general principles ; 
and that among the artists, to whom he turns in his 
despair, no two think alike concerning the same 
master, while his own little learning has made him 
distrust his natural likings and mislikings. Ruskin 
is undoubtedly the best guide you can have in your 
study of the Venetian painters ; and after reading 
him, and suflFering confusion and ignominy from his 
theories and egotisms, the exercises by which you 
are chastised into admission that he has taught you 
any thing cannot fail to end in a humility very fa- 
vorable to your future as a Christian. But even in 
this subdued state you must distrust the methods by 
which he pretends to relate the aesthetic truths you 
perceive to certain civil and religious conditions : you 
scarcely understand how Tintoretto, who genteelly 
disdains (on one page) to paint well any person baser 
than a saint or senator, and with whom " exactly 
in proportion to the dignity of the character is the 
beauty of the painting," — comes (on the next page) 
to paint a very " weak, mean, and painful " figure 
of C|ln:ist ; and knowing a little the loose lives of the 
graat Venetian painters, you must reject, with several 
other humorous postulates, the idea that good color- 



156 VENETIAN LIFE. 

ists are better men than bad colorists. Without any 
guide, I think, these painters may be studied and 
understood, up to a certain point, by one who hves 
in the atmosphere of their art at Venice, and who, 
insensibly breathing in its influence, acquires a feel- 
ing for it which all the critics in the world could not 
impart where the works themselves are not to be 
seen. I am sure that no one strange to the profes- 
sion of artist ever received a just notion of any 
picture by reading the most accurate and faithful 
description of it : stated dimensions fail to convey 
ideas of size ; adjectives are not adequate to the ideas 
of movement ; and the names of the colors, however 
artfully and vividly introduced and repeated, cannot 
tell the reader of a painter's coloring. I should be 
glad to hear what Titian's " Assumption " is like 
from some one who knew it by descriptions. Can 
any one who has seen it tell its likeness, or forget it ? 
Can any cunning critic describe intelligibly the differ- 
ence between the styles of Titian, of Tintoretto, and 
of Paolo Veronese, — that difference which no one 
with the slierhtest feelino; for art can fail to discern 
after looking thrice at their works ? It results from 
all this that I must believe special criticisms on art 
to have their small use only in the presence of the 
works they discuss. This is my sincere belief, and 
I could not, in any honesty, lumber my pages with 
descriptions or speculations which would be idle to 
most readers, even if I were a far wiser judge of art 
than I affect to be. As it is, doubting if I be gifted 
in that way at all, I think I may better devote my- 



CHURCHES AND PICTURES. 157 

self to discussion of such things in Venice as can be 
understood by comparison with things elsewhere, and 
so rest happy in the thought that I have thrown no 
additional darkness on any of the pictures half ob- 
scured now by the religious dimness of the Venetian 
churches. 

Doubt, analogous to that expressed, has already 
made me hesitate to spend the reader's patience upon 
many well-known w^onders of Venice ; and, looking 
back over the preceding chapters, I find that some 
of the principal edifices of the city have scarcely got 
into my book even by name. It is possible that the 
reader, after all, loses nothing by this ; but I should 
regret it, if it seemed ingratitude to that expression 
of the beautiful Avhicli beguiled many dull hours for 
me, and kept me company in many lofiesome ones. 
For kindnesses of this sort, indeed, I am under obliga- 
tions to edifices in every part of the city ; and there 
is hardly a bit of sculptured stone in the Ducal 
Palace to which I do not ow^e some pleasant thought 
or harmless fancy. Yet I am shy of endeavoring in 
my gratitude to transmute the substance of the Ducal 
Palace into some substance that shall be sensible to 
the eyes that look on this print ; and I forgive myself 
the reluctance the more readily when I remember 
how, just after reading Mr. Ruskin's description of St. 
Mark's Church, I, who had seen it every day for three 
years, began to have dreadful doubts of its existence. 

To be sure, tliis was only for a moment, and I do 
not think all the descriptive talent in the world could 
make me again doubt St. Mark's, wduch I remember 



158 VENETIAN LIFE. 

with no less love than veneration. This church In- 
deed has a beauty which touches and wins all hearts, 
while it appeals profoundly to the religious sentiment. 
It is as if there were a shelterino; friendliness In Its 
low-hovering domes and arclies, which lures and ca- 
resses while It awes ; as If here, where the meekest 
soul feels welcome and protection, the spirit oppressed 
with the heaviest load of sin might creep nearest 
to forgiveness, hiding the anguish of Its repentance 
In the temple's dim cavernous recesses, faintly starred 
with mosaic, and twilighted by twinkling altar-lamps. 
Though the temple Is enriched with Incalculable 
value of stone and sculpture, I cannot remember at 
any time to have been struck by Its mere opulence. 
Preciousness of material has been sanctified to the 
highest uses, and there is such unity and justness 
In the solemn splendor, that wonder Is scarcely ap- 
pealed to. Even the priceless and rarely seen treas- 
ures of the church — such as the famous golden altar- 
piece, whose costly blaze of gems and gold was 
lighted In Constantinople six hundred years ago — • 
failed to Impress me with their peogpiary worth, 
though I 

" Value the giddy pleasure of the eyes," 

and like to marvel at precious things. The jewels 
of other churches are conspicuous and silly heaps of 
treasure ; but St. Mark's, where every line of space 
shows delicate labor In rich material, subdues the 
jewels to their place of subordinate adornment. 
So, too, the magnificence of the Romish service 



CHURCHES AND PICTURES. 159 

3eems less vainly ostentatious there. In other 
cliurches the ceremonies may sometimes impress you 
with a sense of their grandeur, and even spirituality, 
but they all need the effect of twilight upon them. 
You want a foreground of kneeling figures, and faces 
half visible through heavy bars of shadow; little 
lamps must tremble before the shrines ; and in the 
background must rise the high altar, all ablaze with 
candles from vault to pavement, while a hidden choir 
pours music from behind, and the organ shakes the 
heart with its heavy tones. But with the daylight 
on its splendors even the grand function of the Te 
Deum fails to awe, and wearies by its length, except 
in St. Mark's alone, which is given grace to spiritu- 
alize what elsewhere would be mere theatric pomp.* 
The basilica, however, is not in every thing the edi- 
fice best adapted to the Romish worship ; for the in- 
cense, which is a main element of the function, is 
gathered and held there in chokino; clouds under the 
low wagon-roofs of the cross-naves. — Yet I do not 
know if I would banish incense from the formula of 
worship evert in St. Mark's. There is certainly a 
poetic if not a religious grace in the swinging censer 

^ The cardinal-patriarch officiates in the BasiHca San Marco 
with some ceremonies wliich I believe are peculiar to the patri- 
archate of Venice, and which consist of an unusal number of 
robings and disrobings, and putting on and off of shoes. All this 
is performed with great gravity, and has, I suppose, some peculiar 
spiritual significance. The shoes are brought by a priest to the 
foot of the patriarchal throne, when a canon removes the profane, 
out-of-door chaussure, and places the sacred shoes on the patri- 
arch's feet. A like ceremony replaces the patriarch's every-day 
gaiters, and the pious rite ends. 



160 VENETIAN LIFE. 

and its curling fumes ; and I think the perfume, as 1 
it steals mitigated to your nostrils, out of the open/ 
church door, is the reverendest smell in the world. I 
The music in Venetian churches is not commonly 
very good : the best is to be heard at St. Mark's, 
though the director of the choir always contrives 
to make so" odious a slapping with his baton as 
nearly to spoil your enjoyment. The great musical 
event of the year is the performance (immediately 
after the Festa del Medentore) of the Soldini Masses. 
These are offered for the repose of one Guiseppe 
Soldini of Verona, who, dying possessed of about 
a million francs, bequeathed a part (some six thou- 
sand francs) annually to the church of St. Mark, 
on conditions named in his will. The terms are, that 
during three successive days, every year, there shall 
be said for the peace of his soul a certain number of 
masses, — all to be done in the richest and costliest 
manner. In case of delinquency, the bequest passes 
to the Philharmonic Society of Milan ; but the priest- 
hood of the basilica so strictly regard the wishes of 
the deceased that they never say less than four 
masses over and above the prescribed number.* 

^ After hearing these masses, curiosity led me to visit the Casa 
di RicoverOy in order to look at Soldini's will, and there I had the 
pleasure of recognizing the constantly recurring fact, that benefi- 
cent humanity is of all countries and religions. The Casa di 
Ricovero is an immense edifice dedicated to the shelter and support 
of the decrepit and helpless of either sex, who are collected there 
to the number of five hundred. The more modern quarter was - 
erected from a bequest by Soldini ; and eternal provision is also 
made by his will for ninety of the inmates. The Secretary of the 
Casa went through all the wards and infirmaries with me, and 



CHURCHES AND PICTURES. 161 

As there is so little in St. Mark's of the paltry or 
revolting character of modern Romanism, one would 
, form too exalted an idea of the dignity of Catholic 
worship if he judged it there. The truth is, the 
sincerity and nobility of a spirit well-nigh unknown 
to the Romish faith of these times, are the ruling 
influences in that temple : the past lays its spell 
upon the present, transfiguring it, and the sublimity 
of the early faith honors the superstition which has 
succeeded it. To see this superstition in all its 
proper grossness and deformity you must go into 
some of the Renaissance churches, — fit tabernacles 
for that droning and mumming spirit which has de- 
prived all young and generous men in Italy of relig- 
ion ; which has made the priests a bitter jest and by- 
word ; which has rendered the population ignorant, 
vicious, and hopeless ; which gives its friendship to 

everywhere I saw cleanliness and comfort (and such content as is 
possible to sickness and old age), without surprise; for I had 
before seen the Civil Hospital of Venice, and knew something of 
the perfection of Venetian charities. 

At last we came to the wardrobe, where the clothes of the 
pensioners are made and kept. Here we were attended by a little, 
slender, palUd young nun, who exhibited the dresses with a simple 
pride altogether pathetic. She was a woman still, poor thing, 
though a nun, and she could not help loving new clothes. They 
called her Madre, who would never be it except in name and 
motherly tenderness. When we had seen all, she stood a moment 
before us, and as one of the coarse woolen lappets of her cape had 
hidden it, she drew out a heavy crucifix of gold, and placed it in 
sight, with a heavenly little ostentation, over her heart. Sweet 
and beautiful vanity ! An angel could have done it without harm, 
but she blushed repentance, and glided away with downcast eyes. 
Poor little mother ! 

11 



162 VENETIAN LIFE. 

tyranny and its hatred to freedom ; which destroys 
the hfe of the Church that it may sustain the power 
of the Pope. The idols of this superstition are the 
fooHshand hideous dolls which people bow to in most 
of the Venetian temples, and of which the most 
abominable is in the church of the Carmelites. It 
represents the Madonna with the Child, elevated 
breast-high to the worshipers. She is crow^ned 
w^ith tinsel and garlanded with paper flowers ; she 
has a blue ribbon about her tightly corseted waist ; 
and she wears an immense spreading hoop. On her 
painted, silly face of wood, with its staring eyes 
shadowed by a wig, is figured a pert smile ; and 
people come constantly and kiss the cross that hangs 
by a chain from her girdle, and utter their prayers 
to her ; while the column near which she sits is hung 
over with pictures celebrating the miracles she has 
performed. 

These votive pictures, indeed, are to be seen on 
most altars of the Virgin, and are no less interesting 
as w^orks of art than as expressions of hopeless su- 
perstition. That Virgin who, in all her portraits, is 
dressed in a churn-shaped gown and who holds a 
Child similarly habited, is the Madonna most effica- 
cious in cases of dreadful accident and hopeless sick- 
ness, if we may trust the pictures which represent 
her interference. You behold a carriage overturned 
and dragged along the ground by frantic horses, and 
the fashionably dressed lady and gentleman in the 
carriage about to be dashed into millions of pieces, 
when the havoc is instantly arrested by this Ma- 



CHURCHES AND PICTURES. 163 

donna, who breaks the clouds, leavmg them with 
jagged and shattered edges, Hke broken panes of 
glass, and visibly holds back the fashionable lady and 
gentleman from destruction. It is the fashionable 
lady and gentleman who have thus recorded their ob- 
ligation ; and it is the mother, doubtless, of the little 
boy miraculously preserved from death in his fall 
from the second-floor balcony, who has gratefully 
caused the miracle to be painted and hung at the 

Madonna's shrine. Now and then vou also find 

t/ 

offerings of corn and fruits before her altar, in ac- 
knowledgment of good crops which the Madonna 
has made to grow ; and again you find rows of silver 
hearts, typical of the sinful hearts which her inter- 
cession has caused to be purged. The greatest num- 
ber of these, at any one shrine, is to be seen in the 
church of San Nicolo dei Tolentini, where I should 
think there were three hundred. 

Whatever may be the popularity of the Madonna 
della Salute in pestilent times, I do not take it to be 
very great when the health of the city is good, if I 
may judge from the spareness of the worshipers in 
the church of her name : it is true that on the annual 
holiday commemorative of her interposition to save 
Venice from the plague, there is an immense con- 
course of people there ; but at other times I found 
the masses and vespers slenderly attended, and I 
did not observe a great number of votive offer- 
ings in the temple, — though the great silver lamp 
placed there by the city, in memory of the Madonna's 
goodness during the visitation of the cholera in 1849, 



164 VENETIAN LIFE. 

may be counted, perhaps, as representative of much 
collective gratitude. It is a cold, superb church, 
lording it over the noblest breadth of the Grand 
Canal ; and I do not know what it is saves it from 
being as hateful to the eye as other temples of the 
Renaissance architecture. But it has certainly a 
jfine effect, with its twin bell-towers and single mas- 
sive dome, its majestic breadth of steps rising from 
the water's edge, and the many-statued sculpture of 
its fafade. Strangers go there to see the splendor 
of its high altar (where the melodramatic Madonna, 
as the centre of a marble group, responds to the 
prayer of the operatic Venezia, and drives away the 
haggard, theatrical Pest), and the excellent Titians 
and the grand Tintoretto in the sacristy. 

The Salute is one of the great show-churches, 
like that of San Giovanni e Paolo, which the common 
poverty of imagination has decided to call the Vene- 
tian Westminster Abbey, because it contains many 
famous tombs and monuments. But there is only 
one Westminster Abbey ; and I am so far a believer 
in the perfectibility of our species as to suppose 
that vergers are nowhere possible but in England. 
There would be nothing to say, after Mr. Ruskin, 
in praise or blame of the great monuments in San 
Giovanni e Paolo, even if I cared to discuss them ; 
I only w^onder that, in speaking of the bad art 
which produced the tomb of the Venieri, he failed 
to mention the successful approach to its depraved 
feeling, made by the single figure sitting on the 
base of a slender shaft, at the side of the first altar. 



CHURCHES AND PICTURES. 165 

on the right of the main entrance. I suppose this 
figure typifies Grief, but it really represents a drunk- 
en woman, whose drapery has fallen, as if in some 
vile debauch, to her waist, and who broods, wdth a 
horrible, heavy stupor and chopfallen vacancy, on 
something w^hich she supports with her left hand 
upon her knee. It is a round of marble, and if you 
have the daring to peer under the arm of the debau- 
chee, and look at it as she does, you find that it con- 
tains the bass-relief of a skull in bronze. Nothing 
more ghastly and abominable than the w^hole thing 
can be conceived, and it seemed to me the fit type 
of the abandoned Venice which produced it ; for one 
even less Ruskinian than I might have fancied that 
in the sculptured countenance could be seen the dis- 
may of the pleasure-wasted harlot of the sea when, 
from time to time, death confronted her amid her 
revels. 

People go into the Chapel of the Rosary here to 
see the painting of Titian, representing The Death 
of Peter Martyr. Behind it stands a painting of 
equal size by John Bellini, — the Madonna, Child, 
and Saints, of course, — and it is curious to study 
in the two pictures those points in which Titian ex- 
celled and fell short of his master. The treatment 
of the sky in the landscape is singularly alike in both, 
but where the greater painter has gained in breadth 
and freedom, he has lost in that indefinable charm 
which belonged chiefly to Bellini, and only to that 
brief age of transition, of which his genius was the fair- 
est flower and ripest fruit. I have looked again and 



166 VENETIAN LIFE. 

again at nearly every painting of note In Venice, 
having a foolish shame to miss a single one, and 
having also a better wish to learn something of the 
beautiful from them ; but at last I must say, that, 
while I wondered at the greatness of some, and tried 
to wonder at the greatness of others, the only paint- 
ings which gave me genuine and hearty pleasure 
were those of Bellini, Carpaccio, and a few others 
of that school and time. 

Every day we used to pass through the court of 
the old Augustinian convent adjoining the church 
of San Stefano. It is a long time since the monks 
were driven out of their snug hold ; and the convent 
is now the head-quarters of the Austrian engineer 
corps, and the colonnade surrounding the court is 
become a public thoroughfare. On one wall of this 
court are remains — very shadowy remains indeed 
— of frescos painted by Pordenone at the period of 
his fiercest rivalry with Titian ; and it is said that 
Pordenone, while he wrought upon the scenes of 
scriptural story here represented, wore his sword and 
buckler, in readiness to repel an attack which he 
feared from his competitor. The story is very vague, 
and I hunted it down in divers authorities only to 
find it grow more and more intangible and uncer- 
tain. But it gave a singular relish to our daily walk 
through the old cloister, and I added, for my own 
pleasure (and chiefly out of my own fancy, I am 
afraid, for I can nowhere localize the fable on which 
I built), that the rivalry between the painters w^as 
partly a love-jealousy, and that the disputed object 



CHURCHES AND PICTURES. 167 

of their passion was that fair Violante, daughter of ^ 
the elder Pahna, who is to be seen in so many pict- 
ures painted by her father, and by her lover, Titian. 
No doubt there are readers will care less for this 
idleness of mine than for the fact that the hard- 
headed German monk, Martin Luther, once said 
mass in the adjoining church of San Stefano, and 
lodged in the convent, on his way to Rome. The 
unhappy Francesco Carrara, last Lord of Padua, is 
buried in this church ; but Venetians are chiefly 
interested there now by the homilies of those fer- 
vent preacher-monks, who deliver powerful sermons 
during Lent. The monks are gifted men, with a 
most earnest and graceful eloquence, and they attract 
immense audiences, like popular and eccentric min- 
isters among ourselves. It is a fashion to hear them, 
and although the atmosphere of the churches in the 
season of Lent is raw, damp, and most uncomfort- 
able, the Venetians then throng the churches where 
they preach. After Lent the sermons and church- 
going cease, and the sanctuaries are once more aban- 
doned to the possession of the priests, droning from 
the altars to the scattered kneelers on the floor, — 
the foul old women and the young girls of the poor, 
the old-fashioned old gentlemen and devout ladies of 
the better class, and that singular race of poverty- 
stricken old men proper to Italian churches, who, 
having dabbled themselves with holy water, wander 
forlornly and aimlessly about, and seem to consort 
wdth the foreigners looking at the objects of interest. 
Lounging young fellows of low degree appear with 



168 VENETIAN LIFE. 

their caps in their hands, long enough to tap them- 
selves upon the breast and nod recognition to the 
high-altar ; and lounging young fellows of high de- 
gree step in to glance at the faces of the pretty girls, 
and then vanish. The droning ends, presently, and 
the devotees disappear, the last to go being that thin 
old woman, kneeling before a shrine, with a grease- 
gray shawl falling from her head to the ground. 
The sacristan, in his perennial enthusiasm about the 
great picture of the church, almost treads upon her 
as he brings the strangers to see it, and she gets 
meekly up and begs of them in a whispering w^him- 
per. The sacristan gradually expels her with the 
visitors, and at one o'clock locks the door and goes 
home. 

By chance I have got a fine effect in churches at 
the five o'clock mass in the morning, when the wor- 
shipers are nearly all peasants who have come to 
market, and who are pretty sure, each one, to have 
a bundle or basket. At this hour the sacristan is 
heavy with sleep ; he dodges uncertainly at the 
tapers as he lights and extinguishes them ; and his 
manner to the congregation, as he passes through it 
to the altar, is altogether rasped and nervous. I 
think it is best to be one's self a little sleepy, — when 
the barefooted friar at the altar (if it is in the church 
of the Scalzi, say) has a habit of getting several 
centuries back from you, and of saying mass to the 
patrician ghosts from the tombs under your feet ; 
and there is nothing at all impossible in the Renais- 
sance angels and cherubs in marble, floating and 



CHURCHES AND PICTURES. 169 

fatly tumbling about on the broken arches of the 
altars. 

I have sometimes been puzzled in Venice to know 
why churches should keep cats, church-mice being 
proverbially so poor, and so little capable of sustain- 
ing a cat in good condition ; yet I have repeatedly 
found sleek and portly cats in the churches, where 
they seem to be on terms of perfect understanding 
with the priests, and to have no quarrel even with 
the little boys who assist at mass. There is, for in- 
stance, a cat in the sacristy of the Frari, which I 
have often seen in familiar association with the eccle- 
siastics there, when they came into his room to robe 
or disrobe, or warm their hands, numb with suppli- 
cation, at the great brazier in the middle of the floor. 
I do not think this cat has the slightest interest in 
the lovely Madonna of Bellini which hangs in the 
sacristy ; but I suspect him of dreadful knowledge 
concerning the tombs in the church. I have no 
doubt he has passed through the open door of Can- 
ova's monument, and that he sees some coherence 
and meaning in Titian's ; he has been all over the 
great mausoleum of the Doge Pesaro, and he knows 
whether the griffins descend from their perches at 
the midnight hour to bite the naked knees of the 
ragged black caryatides. This profound and awful 
animal I take to be a blood relation of the cat in 
the church of San Giovanni e Paolo, who sleeps like 
a Christian during divine service, and love^ a certain 
glorious bed on the top of a bench, where the sun 
strikes upon him through the great painted window, 



f 



170^ VENETIAN LIFE. 

and dapples his tawny coat with lovely purples and 
crimsons. 

The church cats are apparently the friends of the 
sacristans, with whom their amity is maintained 
probably by entire cession of the spoils of visitors. 
In these, therefore, they seldom take any interest, 
merely opening a lazy eye now and then to wink at 
the sacristans as they drag the deluded strangers 
from altar to altar, with intense enjoyment of the 
absurditv, and a wicked satisfaction in the incredible 
stories rehearsed. I fancy, being Italian cats, they 
feel something like a national antipathy toward those 
^.troops of German tourists, who always seek the 
Sehenswiirdigkeiten in companies of ten or twenty, 
— the men wearino; their beards, and the women 
their hoops and hats, to look as much like English 
people as possible ; while their valet marshals them 
forward with a stream of guttural information, un- 
broken by a single punctuation point. These wise 
cats know the real English by their " Murrays ; " 
and I think they make a shrewd guess at the nation- 
ality of us Americans by the speed with which we 
pass from one thing to another, and by our national 
ignorance of all languages but English. They must 
also hear us vaunt the superiority of our own land 
in unpleasant comparisons, and I do not think they 
believe us, or like us, for our boastings. I am sure 
they would say to us, if they could, " Quando finird 
mai quella giierra ? Che sangue ! die orrore / " * The 

^ " When will this war ever be ended ? what blood ! wliat hor- 
ror ! " I have often heard the question and the comment from 
many Italians who were not cats. 



&) 'm 



xcA <r-LL7 ( TC^i/u-is) 



CHURCHES AND PICTURES. 171 

French tourist they distinguish by his evident skep- 
ticism concerning his own wisdom in quitting Paris 
for the present purpose ; and the travehng Itahan, by 
his attention to his badly dressed, handsome wife, 
wdth whom he is now making his w^edding trip. 

I have found churches undergoing repairs (as most 
of them always are in Venice) rather interesting. 
Under these circumstances, the sacristan is obhged 
to take you into all sorts of secret places and odd 
corners, to show you the objects of interest; and 
you may often get ghmpses of pictures which, if not 
removed from their proper places, it would be impos- 
sible to see. The carpenters and masons work most 
deliberately, as if in a place so set against progress 
that speedy workmanship would be a kind of impiety. 
Besides the mechanics, there are always idle priests 
standing about, and vagabond boys clambering over 
the scaffolding. In San Giovanni e Paolo I remem- 
ber we one day saw a small boy appear through an 
opening in the roof, and descend by means of some 
hundred feet of dangling rope. The spectacle, which 
made us ache wdth fear, delighted his companions so 
much that their applause was scarcely subdued by 
the sacred character of the place. As soon as he 
reached the ground in safety, a gentje, good-natured 
looking priest took him by the arm and cuffed his 
ears. It was a scene for a painter. 



CHAPTER XII. 

SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS. 

Nothing can be fairer to the eye than these " sum- 
mer isles of Eden " lying all about Venice, far and 
near. The water forever trembles and changes, 
with every change of light, from one rainbow glory 
to another, as with the restless hues of an opal ; and 
even when the splendid tides recede, and go down 
with the sea, they leave a heritage of beauty to the 
empurpled mud of the shallows, all strewn with 
green, disheveled sea-weed. The lagoons have al- 
most as wide a bound as your vision. On the east 
and west you can see their borders of sea-shore and 
main-land ; but looking north and south, there seems 
no end to the charm of their vast, smooth, ail-but 
melancholy expanses. Beyond their southern limit 
rise the blue Euganean Hills, where Petrarch died ; 
on the north loom the Alps, white with snow. Dot- 
tmg the stretches of lagoon in every direction lie 
the islands — now piles of airy architecture that the 
water seems to float under and bear upon its breast, 

now 

" Sunny spots of greenery/* 

with the bell-towers of demolished cloisters shadowily 
showing above their trees ; — for in the days of the 



SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS. 173 

Republic nearly every one of the islands had its 
monastery and its church. At present the greater 
number have been fortified by the Austrians, whose 
sentinel paces the once - peaceful shores, and chal- 
lenges all passers with his sharp *' Halt! Wer da !^^ 
and warns them not to approach too closely. Other 
islands have been devoted to different utilitarian pur- 
poses, and few are able to keep their distant promises 
of loveliness. One of the more faithful is the island 
of San Clemen te, on which the old convent church 
is yet standing, empty and forlorn within, but w^ith- 
out all draped in glossy ivy. After I had learned to 
row in the gondolier fashion, I voyaged much in the 
lagoon with my boat, and often stopped at this 
church. It has a curious feature in the chapel of 
the Madonna di Loreto, which is built in the middle 
of the nave, faced with marble, roofed, and isolated 
from the w^alls of the main edifice on all sides. On 
the back of this there is a bass-relief in bronze, rep- 
resenting the Nativity — a work much in the spirit 
of the bass-reliefs in San Giovanni e Paolo ; and 
one of the chapels has an exquisite little altar, with 
gleaming columns of porphyry. There has been no 
service in the church for many years ; and this altar 
had a strangely pathetic effect, won from the black 
^ four-cornered cap of a priest that lay before it, like 
an offering. I w^ondered who the priest was that wore 
it, and why he had left it there, as if he had fled 
away in haste. I might have thought it looked like 
the signal of the abdication of a system ; the gondo- 
lier who was with me took it up and reviled it aa 



174 VENETIAN LIFE. 

representative of birhanti matricolati^ who fed upon 
the poor, and in whose expulsion from that island he 
rejoiced. But he had little reason to do so, since 
the last use of the place was for the imprisonment 
of refractory ecclesiastics. Some of the tombs of 
the Morosini are in San Clemente — villanous monu- 
ments, with bronze Deaths popping out of apertures, 
and holding marble scrolls inscribed with undying 
deeds. Indeed, nearly all the decorations of the 
poor old church are horrible, and there is one statue 
in it meant for an angel, with absolutely the most 
lascivious face I ever saw in marble. 

The islands near Venice are all small, except the 
Giudecca (which is properly a part of the city), the 
Lido, and Murano. The Giudecca, from being 
anciently the bounds in which certain factious nobles 
were confined, was later laid out in pleasure-gardens, 
and built up with summer-palaces. The gardens 
still remain to some extent ; but they are now chiefly 
turned to practical account in raising vegetables 
and fruits for the Venetian market, and the palaces 
have been converted into warehouses and factories. 
This island produces a variety of beggar, the most 
truculent and tenacious in all Venice, and it has a 
convent of lazy Capuchin friars, who are likewise 
beggars. To them belongs the church of the Reden- 
tore, which only the Madonnas of Bellini in the sac- 
risty make worthy to be seen, — though the island is 
hardly less famed for this church than for the diffi- 
cult etymology of its name. 

At the eastern extremity of the Giudecca lies the 



SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS. 175 

Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, with Palladio's 
church of that name. There are some great Tin- 
torettos in the church, and I Hke the beautifvd wood- 
carvings in the choir. The island has a sad interest 
from the pohtical prison into which part of the old 
convent has been perverted ; and the next island 
eastward is the scarcely sadder abode of the mad. 
Then cornes the fair and happy seat of Armenian 
learning and piety, San Lazzaro, and then the Lido. 

The Lido is the sea-shore, and thither in more 
cheerful days the Venetians used to resort in great 
numbers on certain holidays, called the Mondays of 
the Lido, to enjoy the sea-breeze and the country 
scenery, and to lunch upon the flat tombs of the 
Hebrews, buried there in exile from the consecrated 
Christian ground. On a summer's day there the sun 
glares down upon the sand and flat gravestones, and 
it seems the most desolate place where one's bones 
might be laid. The Protestants were once also in- 
terred on the Lido, but now they rest (apart from 
the Catholics, however) in the cemetery of San 
Michele. 

The island is long and narrow : it stretches be 
tween the lagoons and the sea, with a village at either 
end, and with bath-houses on the beach, which is 
everywhere faced with forts. There are some poor 
little trees there, and grass, — things which we were 
thrice a week grateful for, when we went thither to 
bathe. I do not know whether it will give the place 
further interest to say, that it was among the tombs 
of the Hebrews Cooper's ingenious Bravo had the 



176 VENETIAN LIFE. 

incredible good luck to hide himself from the shirri 
of the Republic ; or to relate that it was the habit 
of Lord Byron to gallop up and down the Lido in 
search of that conspicuous solitude of which the sin- 
cere bard was fond. 

One day of the first summer I spent in Venice 
(three years of Venetian life afterward removed it 
back into times of the remotest antiquity), a friend 
and I had the now-incredible enterprise to walk from 
one end of the Lido to the other, — from the port of 
San Nicolo (through which the Bucintoro passed 
when the Doges went to espouse the Adriatic) to 
the port of Malamocco, at the southern extremity. 

We began with that delicious bath which you may 
have in the Adriatic, where the light surf breaks 
with a pensive cadence on the soft sand, all strewn 
with brilliant shells. The Adriatic is the bluest 
water I have ever seen ; and it is an ineffable, 
lazy delight to lie and watch the fishing sails of pur- 
ple and yellow dotting its surface, and the greater 
ships dipping down its utmost rim. It was particu- 
larly good to do this after coming out of the water ; 
but our American blood could not brook much re- 
pose, and we got up presently, and started on our 
walk to the little village of Malamocco, some three 
miles away. The double-headed eagle keeps watch 
and ward from a continuous line of forts along the 
shore, and the white-coated sentinels never cease to 
pace the bastions, night or day. Their vision of 
the sea must not be interrupted by even so much as 
the form of a stray passer ; and as we went by the 



SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS. 177 

forts, we had to descend from the sea-wall, and walk 
under it, until we got beyond the sentry's beat. 
The crimson poppies grow everywhere on this sandy 
little isle, and they fringe the edges of the bastions 
with their bloom, as if the '' blood-red blossoms of 
war " had there sprung from the seeds of battle 
sown in old forgotten fights. But otherwise the forts 
were not very engaging in appearance. A sentry- 
box of yellow and black, a sentry, a row of seaward 
frowning: cannon — there was not much in all this to 
interest us ; and so we walked idly along, and looked 
either to the city rising from the lagoons on one 
hand, or the ships going down the sea on the other. 
In the fields, along the road, were vines and Indian 
corn ; but instead of those effigies of humanity, 
doubly fearful from their wide unlikeness to any 
thing human, which we contrive to scare away the 
birds, the devout peasant-folks had here displayed on 
poles the instruments of the Passion of the Lord — 
the hammer, the cords, the nails — ■ which at once 
protected and blessed the fields. But I doubt if even 
these would save them from the New- World pigs, 
and certainly the fences here w^ould not turn pork, 
for they are made of a matting of reeds, woven to- 
gether, and feebly secured to tremulous posts. The 
fields were well cultivated, and the vines and garden 
vegetables looked flourishing ; but the corn was 
spindling, and had, I thought, a homesick look, as 
if it dreamed vainly of wide ancestral bottom-lands, 
on the mighty streams that run through the heart of 
the Great West. The Italians call our corn gran 

12 



178 VENETIAN LIFE. 

turco ; but I knew that it was for the West that it 
yearned, and not for the East, 

No doubt there w^ere once finer dwelhngs than the 
peasants' houses which are now the only habitations 
on the Lido ; and I suspect that a genteel villa must 
formerly have stood near the farm-gate, which we 
found surmounted by broken statues of Venus and 
Diana. The poor goddesses were both headless, and 
some cruel fortune had struck off their hands, and 
they looked strangely forlorn in the swaggering at- 
titudes of the absurd period of art to which they be- 
longed : they extended their mutilated arms toward 
the sea for pity, but it regarded them not ; and we 
passed before them scoffing at their bad taste, for we 
were hungry, and it was yet some distance to Mala- 
mocco. 

This dirty little village was the capital of the 
Venetian islands before King Pepin and his Franks 
burned it, and the shifting sands of empire gathered 
solidly about the Rialto in Venice. It is a thousand 
years since that time, and Malamocco has long been 
given over to fishermen's families and the soldiers 
of the forts. We found the latter lounmno; about 
the unwholesome streets ; and the former seated at 
their thresholds, engaged in those pursuits of the 
chase which the use of a fine-tooth comb would un- 
dignify to mere slaughter. 

There is a church at Malamocco, but it was closed, 
and we could not find the sacristan ; so we went to 
the little restaurant, as the next best place, and de- 
manded something to eat. Wiiat had the padrone ? 



SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS. 179 

He answered pretty much to the same effect as the 
mnkeeper in " Don Quixote," who told his guests that 
they could have any thing that w^alked on the earth, 
or swam in the sea, or flew in the air. We w^ould 
take, then, some fish, or a bit of veal, or some mut- 
ton chops. The padrone sweetly shrugged the shoul- 
ders of apology. There was nothing of all this, but 
what vrould we say to some liver or gizzards of 
chickens, fried upon the instant and ready the next 
breath ? No, we did not \vant them ; so we com- 
promised on some ham fried in a batter of eggs, and 
reeking with its own fatness. The truth is, it was a 
very bad little lunch we made, and nothing redeemed 
it but the amiability of the smiHng padrone and the 
bustling padrona, who served us as kings and princes. 
It was a clean hostelry, though, and that was a 
merit in Malamocco, of w^hich the chief modern 
virtue is that it cannot hold you long. No doubt it 
was more interesting in other times. In the days 
w^hen the Venetians chose it for their capital, it was 
a walled town, and fortified with towers. It has 
been more than once inundated by the sea, and it 
might again be washed out wdth advantage. 

In the spring, two years after my visit to Mala- 
mocco, we people in Casa Falier made a long-intended 
expedition to the island of Torcello, w^hich is perhaps 
the most interesting of the islands of the lagoons. 
We had talked of it all winter, and had acquired 
enough property there . to put up some light Spanish 
castles on the desolate site of the ancient city, that, 
60 many years ago, sickened of the swamp air and 



180 VENETIAN LIFE, 

died. A Count from Torcello is the title which Ve- 
netian persiflage gives to improbable noblemen ; and 
thus even the pride of the dead Republic of Torcello 
has passed into matter of scornful jest, as that of tlie 
dead Republic of Venice may likewise in its day. 

When we leave the riva of Casa Falier, we pass 
down the Grand Canal, cross the Basin of St. Mark, 
and enter one of the narrow canals that intersect the 
Riva degli Schiavoni, wdience we wind and deviate 
southwestward till we emerge near the church of 
San Giovanni e Paolo, on the Fondamenta Nuove. 
On our way we notice that a tree, hanging over the 
water froni a little garden, is in full leaf, and at 
Murano we see the tender bloom of peaches and the 
drifted blossom of cherry-trees. 

As we go by the Cemetery of San Michele, Piero 
the gondolier and Giovanna improve us with a little 
solemn pleasantry. 

''It "is a small place," says Piero, "but there is 
room enough for all Venice in it." 

" It is true," assents Giovanna, " and here we 
poor folks become landholders at last." 

At Murano we stop a moment to look at the old 
Duomo, and to enjoy its quaint mosaics within, and 
the fine and graceful spirit of the opszs without. It 
is very old, this architecture ; but the eternal youth 
of the beautiful belongs to it, and there is scarce a 
stone fallen from it that I would replace. 

The manufacture of glass . at Murano, of which 
the origin is so remote, may be said to form the only 
branch of industry which still flourishes in the la- 



SOME ISLANDS OP THE LAGOONS. 181 

goons. Muraiiese beads are exported to all quarters 
in vast quantities, and the process of making them is 
one of the things that strangers feel they must see 
when visiting Venice. The famous mirrors are no 
longer made, and the glass has deteriorated in qual- 
ity, as well as in the beauty of the thousand curious 
forms it took. The test of the old glass, whicl^ 
is now imitated a great deal, is its extreme light- 
ness. I suppose the charming notion that glass 
was once wrought at Murano of such fineness that 
it burst into fragments if poison were poured into it, 
must he fabulous. And yet it would have been an 
excellent thing in the good old toxicological days of 
Italy ; and people of noble family would have found 
a sensitive P:oblet of this sort as sovereiOT ao;ainst the 
arts of venomers as an exclusive diet of boiled eggs. 
The city of Murano has dwindled from thirty to 
five thousand in population. It is. intersected by a 
system of canals like Venice, and has a Grand Canal 
of its own, of as stately breadth as that of the cap- 
ital. The finer houses are built on this canal ; but 
the beautiful palaces, once occupied in villeggiatura 
by the noble Venetians, are now inhabited by herds 
of poor, or converted into glass-works. The famous 
Cardinal Bembo and other literati made the island 
their retreat, and beautified it with gardens and foun- 
tains. Casa Priuli in that day was, according to Ve- 
netian ideas, '' a terrestrial Paradise," and a proper 
haunt of '' nymphs and demi-gods." But the wealth, 
the learning, and the elegance of former times, 
which planted " groves of Academe " at Murano, 



182 VENETIAN LIFE. 

have passed away, and the fair pleasure-gardens are 
now weed-grown wastes, or turned into honest cab- 
bage and potato patches. It is a poor, dreary little 
town, with an inexplicable charm in its decay. The 
city arms are still displayed upon the public buildings 
(for Murano was ruled, independently of Venice, 
tiy its own council) ; and the heraldic cock, with a 
snake in its beak, has yet a lusty and haughty air 
amid the rain of the place. 

The way in which the spring made itMf felt upon 
the lao;oon was full of curious delio;ht. It was not 
so early in the season that we should know the spring 
by the first raw warmth in the air, and there was as 
yet no assurance of her presence in the growth — 
later so luxuriant — of the coarse grasses of the shal- 
lows. But somehow the spring was there, giving us 
new life with every breath. There were fewer gulls 
than usual, and those we saw sailed far overhead, 
debating departure. There was deeper languor in 
the laziness of the soldiers of finance, as they lounged 
and slept upon their floating custom houses in every 
channel of the lagoons ; and the hollow voices of the 
boatmen, yelUng to each other as their wont is, had 
an uncommon tendency to diffuse themselves in echo. 
Over all, the heavens had put on their summer blue, 
in promise of that delicious weather which in the 
lagoons lasts half the year, and which makes every 
other climate seem niggard of sunshine and azure 
skies. I know we have beautiful days at home — 
days of which the sumptuous splendor used to take 
my memory with unspeakable longing and regret 



SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS. 183 

even in Italy ; — but we do not Lave, week after 
week, month after month, that 

" Blue, unclouded weather," 

which, at Venice, contents all your senses, and makes 
you exult to be alive with the inarticulate gladness 
of children, or of the swallows that there all day 
wheel and dart through the air, and shriek out a de- 
light too intense and precipitate for song. 

The island of Torcello is some five miles away 
from Venice, in the northern lagoon. -The city was 
founded far back in the troubled morning of Chris- 
tian civilization, by refugees from barbarian invasion, 
and built with stones quarried from the ruins of old 
Altinum, over which Attila had passed desolating. 
During the first ages of its existence Torcello en- 
joyed the doubtful advantage of protection from the 
Greek emperors, but fell afterward under the dom- 
ination of Venice. In the thirteenth century the 
debris of the river that emptied into the lagoon there 
began to choke up the wholesome salt canals, and to 
poison the air with swampy malaria ; and in the 
seventeenth century the city had so dwindled that 
the Venetian podestd removed his residence from the 
depopulated island to Burano, — though the bishopric 
established immediately after the settlement of the 
refugees at Torcello continued there till 1814, to 
the satisfaction, no doubt, of the frogs and mosqui- 
toes that had long inherited the former citizens. 

I confess that I know little more of the history of 
Torcello than I found in my guide-book. There I 



184 VENETIAN LIFE. 

read that the city had once stately civic and rehgions 
edifices, and that in the tenth century the Emperor 
Porphorygenitus called it " 'magnum emporium Tor- 
cellanorumy The much-restored cathedral of the 
seventh century, a little church, a building supposed 
to have been the public palace, and other edifices so 
ruinous and so old that their exact use in other days 
is not now known, are all that remain of the magnum 
emporium^ except some lines of moldering wall that 
wander along the canals, and through pastures and 
vineyards, in the last imbecile stages of dilapidation 
and decay. There is a lofty bell-tower, also, from 
which, no doubt, the Torcellani used to descry afar 
• off the devourino; hordes of the barbarians on the 
main-land, and prepare for defense. As their city 
was never actually invaded, I am at a loss to account 
for the so-called Throne of Attila, which stands in 
the grass-grown piazza before the cathedral ; and I 
fear that it may really have been after all only the 
seat which the ancient Tribunes of Torcello occupied 
on public occasions. It is a stone arm-chair, of a 
rude stateliness, and though I questioned its authen- 
ticity, I went and sat down in it a little while, to give 
myself the benefit of a doubt in case Attila had really 
pressed the same seat. "^ 

As soon as our gondola touched the grassy shores 
at Torcello, Giovanna's children, Beppi and Nina, 
whom we had brought with us to give a first expe- 
rience of trees and flowers and mother earth, leaped 
from the boat and took possession of land and water. 
By a curious fatality the little girl, who was was bred 



SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS. 185 

safely amid the hundred canals of Venice, signalized 
her absence from their perils by presently falling into 
the only canal in Torcello, whence she was taken 
dripping, to be confined at a farm-house during the 
rest of our stay. The children were wild with pleas- 
ure, being absolutely new to the country, and ran 
over the island, plucking bouquets of weeds and 
flowers by armsful. A rake, borne afield upon the 
shoulder of a peasant, afterwhile fascinated the Ve- 
netian Beppi, and drew him away to study its strange 
and wonderful uses. 

The simple inhabitants of Torcello came forth with 
gifts, or rather bargains, of flowers, to meet their 
discoverers, and, in a little while, exhausted our 
soldi. They also attended us in full force when we 
sat down to lunch, — the old, the young men and 
maidens, and the little children, all alike sallow, tat- 
tered, and dirty. Under these circumstances, a 
sense of the idyllic and the patriarchal gave zest to 
our collation, and moved us to bestow, in a splendid 
manner, fragments of the feast among the poor 
Torcellani. Knowing the abstemiousness of Italians 
everywhere, and seeing the hungry fashion in which 
the islanders clutched our gifts and devoured them, 
it w^as our doubt whether any one of them had ever 
experienced perfect repletion. I incline to think 
that a chronic famine gnawed their entrails, and that 
they never filled their bellies but with draughts of 
the east wind disdained of Job. The smaller among 
them even scrambled with the dog for the bones, 
until a little girl was bitten, when a terrific tumult 



186 VENETIAN LIFE. 

arose, and the dog was driven home by the whole 
multitude. The children presently returned. They 
all had that gift of beauty which Nature seldom 
denies to the children of their race ; but being, as I 
said, so dirty, their beauty shone forth chiefly from 
their large soft eyes. They had a very graceful, 
bashful archness of manner, and they insinuated beg- 
gary so winningly, that it would have been impos- 
sible for hungry people to deny them. As for us, 
having lunched, we gave them every thing that re- 
mained, and went off to feast our enthusiasm for art 
and antiquity in the cathedral. 

Of course, I have not the least intention of de- 
scribino; it. I remember best amono; its wonders the 
bearing of certain impenitents in one of the mosaics 
on the walls, whom the earnest early artist had 
meant to represent as suffering in the flames of tor- 
ment. I think, however, I have never seen com- 
placence equal to that of these sinners, unless it was 
in the countenances of the seven fat kine, which, as 
represented in the vestibule of St. Mark's, wear an 
air of the sleepiest and laziest enjoyment, while the 
seven lean kine, having just come up from the river, 
devour steaks from their bleeding haunches. There 
are other mosaics in the Torcello cathedral, espe- 
cially those in the apsis and in one of the side chap- 
els, which are in a beautiful spirit of art, and form the 
widest possible contrast to the eighteenth - century 
high altar, with its insane and ribald angels flying off 
at the sides, and poising themselves in the rope- 
dancing attitudes favored by statues of heavenly 



SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS. 187 

persons in the decline of the Renaissance. The 
choir is pecuharly built^ in the form of a half-circle, 
with seats rising one above another, as in an amphi- 
theatre, and a flight of steps ascending to the 
bishop's seat above all, — after the manner of the 
earliest Christian churches. The partition parapet 
before the high altar is of almost transparent marble, 
delicately and quaintly sculptured with peacocks and 
lions, as the Byzantines loved to carve them; and 
the capitals of the columns dividing the naves are 
of infinite richness. Part of the marble pulpit has 
a curious bass-relief, said to be representative of the 
worship of Mercury ; and indeed the Torcellani owe 
much of the beauty of their Duomo to unrequited 
antiquity. (They came to be robbed in their turn : 
for the opulence of their churches was so great 
that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the 
severest penalties had to be enacted against those 
who stole from them. No one will be surprised to 
learn that the clergy themselves participated in these 
spoliations ; but I believe no ecclesiastic was ever 
lashed in the piazza, or deprived of an eye or a hand 
for his offense.) The Duomo has the peculiar Cath- 
olic interest, and the horrible fascination, of a dead 
saint's mortal part in a glass case. 

An arcade runs along the fagade of the cathedral, 
and around the side and front of the adjoining church 
of Santa Fosca, which is likewise very old. But we 
found nothing in it but a dusty, cadaverous stench, 
and so we came away and ascended the campanile. 
From the top of this you have a view of the lagoon, 



188 VENETIAN LIFE. 

in all Its iridescent hues, and of the heaven-blue sea. 
Here, lookmg toward the mam-land, I would have 
been glad to experience the feelings of the Torcel- 
lani of old, as they descried the smoking advance 
of Huns or Vandals. But the finer emotions are 
like gifted children, and are seldom equal to occa- 
sions. I am ashamed to say that mine got no fur- 
ther than Castle Bluebeard, with Lady Bluebeard's 
sister looking out for her brothers, and tearfully re- 
sponding to Lady B.'s repeated and agonized en- 
treaty, " O sister, do you see them yet ? " 

The old w^oman who had opened the door of the 
campanile was surprised into hospitality by the sum 
of money w^e gave her, and took us through her 
house (which was certainly very neat and clean) 
into her garden, w^here she explained the nature of 
many familiar trees and shrubs to us poor Venetians. 

We went back home over the twilight lagoon, and 
Giovanna expressed the general feeling when she 
said : " Torsello xe beo — no si pol negar — la cam- 
pagna xe lea ; ma henedetta la mia Venezia ! " 
(The country is beautiful — it can't be denied — 
Torcello is beautiful ; but blessed be my Venice ! ) 

The panorama of the southern lagoon is best seen 
in a voyage to Chioggia, or Ciozza, the quaint and 
historic little city that lies twenty miles away from 
Venice, at one of the ports of the harbor. The 
Giant Sea-wall, built there by the Repubhc in her 
decline, is a work of Roman grandeur, which im- 
presses you more deeply than any other monument 
of the past with a sense of her former industrial and 



SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS. 189 

commercial greatness. Strips of village border the 
narrow Littorale all the way to Chioggia, and on the 
right lie the islands of the lagoon. Chioggia itself is 
hardly more than a village, — a Venice in miniature, 
like Murano, with canals and boats and bridges. 
But here the character of life is more amphibious 
than in brine-bound Venice ; and though there is no 
horse to be seen in the central streets of Chioggia, 
peasants' teams penetrate her borders by means of 
a long bridge from the main-land. 

Of course Chioggia has passed through the cus- 
tomary vicissitudes of Italian towns, and has been 
depopulated at divers times by pestilence, famine, 
and war. It suffered cruelly in the war with the 
Genoese in 1380, when it was taken by those ene- 
mies of St. Mark ; and its people \vere so wasted by 
the struggle that the Venetians, on regaining it, were 
obliged to invite immigration to repopulate its empti- 
ness. I do not know how great comfort the Chiozzotti 
of that unhappy day took in the fact that some of the 
earliest experiments with cannon were made in the 
contest that destroyed them, but I can hardly offer 
them less tribute than to mention it here. At pres- 
ent the place is peopled almost entirely by sailors 
and fishermen, whose wives are more famous for their 
beauty than their amiability. Goldoni's " Baruffe 
Chiozzotte " is an amusing and vivid picture of the 
daily battles which the high-spirited ladies of the 
city fought in the dramatist's * time, and which are 

* Goldoni's family went from Venice to Chioggia when the 
dramatist was very young. The descriptions of his life there form 
Bome of the most interesting chapters of his Memoirs. 



190 VENETIAN LIFE. 

said to be of frequent occurrence at tins day. The 
Chiozzotte are the only women of this part of Italy 
who still preserve a semblance ®f national costume ; 
and this remnant of more picturesque times consists 
merely of a skirt of white, which, being open in front, 
is drawn from the w^aist over the head and gathered 
in the hand under the chin, giving to the flashing 
black eyes and swarthy features of the youthful 
wearer a look of very dangerous slyness and cunning. 
The dialect of the Chiozzotti is said to be that of the 
early Venetians, with an admixture of Greek, and it 
is infinitely more sweet and musical than the dialect 
now spoken in Venice. "Whether derived," says 
the author of the " Fiore di Venezia," alluding to 
the speech of these peculiar people, " from those 
who first settled these shores, or resulting from 
other physical and moral causes, it is certain that the 
tone of the voice is here more varied and powerful : 
the mouth is thrown wide open in speaking ; a pas- 
sion, a lament mingles with laughter itself, and there 
is a continual ritornello of words previously spoken. 
But this speech is full of energy ; whoever would 
study brief and strong modes of expression should 
come here." 

Chioggia was once the residence of noble and dis- 
tinguished persons, among whom was the painter 
Rosalba Carrera, famed throughout Europe for her 
crayon miniatures ; and the place produced in the 
sixteenth century the great maestro Giuseppe Zarlino, 
'^ who passes," says Cantu, '' for the restorer of mod- 
ern music," and " whose ' Orfeo ' heralded the invcn- 



SOME ISLANDS OF THE LAGOONS. 191 

tion of the musical drama." This composer claimed 
for his birthplace the doubtful honor of the institu- 
tion of the order of the Capuchins, which he de- 
clared to have been founded by Fra Paolo (Gio- 
vanni Sambi) of Chioggia. There is not much now 
to see in poor little Chioggia except its common peo- 
ple, who, after a few minutes' contemplation, can 
hardly interest any one but the artist. There are 
no dwellings in the town which approach palatial 
grandeur, and nothing in the Renaissance churches 
to claim attention, unless it be an attributive Bellini 
in one of them. Yet if you have the courage to 
climb the bell-tower of the cathedral, you get from 
its summit the loveliest imaginable view of many- 
purpled lagoon and silver-flashing sea ; and if you 
are sufficiently acquainted with Italy and Italians to 
observe a curious fact, and care to study the subject, 
you may note the great difference between the in- 
habitants of Chioggia and those of Palestrina, — an 
island divided from Chioggia by a half mile of lagoon, 
and by quite different costume, type of face, and ac- 
cent. 

Just between Chiop-o-ia and the sea lies the lazv 
town of Sottomarina, and I should say that the pop- 
ulation of Sottomarina chiefly spent its time in loung- 
ing up and down the Sea-wall ; while that of Chiog- 
gia, when not professionally engaged with the net, 
gave its leisure to playing mora ^ in the shade, or 

'^ Mora is the game which the Italians play with their fingers, 
one throwing out two, three, or four fingers, as the case may be, 
and calling the number at the same instant. If (so I understood 



192 VENETIAN LIFE. 

pitilessly pursuing strangers, and offering them boats. 
For my own part, I refused the subtlest advances of 
this kind which were made me in Chiozzotto, but fell 
a helpless prey to a boatman who addressed me in 
some words of wonderful English, and then rowed 
me to the Sea-wall at about thrice the usual fare. 

These primitive people are bent, in their out-of- 
the-world, remote way, upon fleecing the passing 
stranger quite as earnestly as other Italians, and they 
naively improve every occasion for plunder. As we 
passed up the shady side of their wide street, we 
came upon a plump little blond boy, lying asleep on 
the stones, with his head upon his arm ; and as no 
one was near, the artist of our party stopped to 
sketch the sleeper. Atmospheric knowledge of the 
fact spread rapidly, and in a few minutes we were 
the centre of a general assembly of the people of 
Chioggia, who discussed us, and the artist's treat- 
ment of her subject, in open congress. They handed 
round the airy chaff* as usual, but were very orderly 
and respectful, nevertheless, — one father of the 
place quelling every tendency to tumult by kicking 
his next neighbor, who passed on the penalty till, by 
this simple and ingenious process, the guilty cause of 
the trouble was infallibly reached and kicked at last. 
I placed a number of soldi in the boy's hand, to the 
visible sensation of the crowd, and then we moved 

the game) the player mistakes the number of fingers he throws 
out, he loses ; if he hits the number with both voice and fingers, 
he wins. It is played with tempestuous interest, and is altogether 
fiendish in appearance. 



SOME ISLANDS OP THE LAGOONS 193 

away and left him, heading, as we w^ent, a proces- 
sion of Chiozzotti, who could not make up their minds 
to relinquish us till w^e took refuge in a church. 
When we came out the procession had disappeared, 
but all round the church door, and picturesquely 
scattered upon the pavement in every direction, lay 
boys asleep, with their heads upon their arms. As 
we passed laughing through the midst of these slum- 
berers, they rose and followed us with cries of" Mi 
tiri zu ! Mi tiri zu ! " (Take me down ! Take me 
down !) They ran ahead, and fell asleep again in 
our path, and round every corner w^e came upon a 
sleeping boy ; and, indeed, we never got out of that 
atmosphere of slumber till we returned to the steamer 
for Venice, when Chioggia shook off her drow^sy 
stupor, and began to tempt us to throw soldi into the 
water, to be dived for by her aw^akened children. 
13 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE ARMENIANS. 

Among the pleasantest friends we made In Venice 
were the monks of the Armenian Convent, whose 
cloistral buildings rise from the glassy lagoon, upon 
the south of the city, near a mile away. This bulk 

" Of mellow brick-work on an isle of bowers *' 

is walled in with solid masonry from the sea, and 
encloses a garden - court, filled with all beautiful 
flowers, and with the memorable trees of the East; 
while another garden encompasses the monastery 
itself, and yields those honest fruits and vegetables 
which supply the wants of the well-cared-for mortal 
part of the good brothers. The island is called San 
Lazzaro, and the convent was established in 1717 by 
a learned and devoted Armenian priest named Mechi- 
thar, from whom the present order of monks is called 
Mechitharist. He was the first who formed the idea 
of educating a class of priests to act as missionaries 
among the Armenian nation in the East, and infuse 
into its civil and religious decay the life of European 
piety and learning. He founded at Sebaste, there- 
fore, a religious order of which the seat was presently 
removed to Constantinople, where the friars met with 
so much persecution from Armenian heterodoxy that 



THE ARMENIANS. 195 

it was again transferred, and fixed at Modone in 
Morea. That territory falling into the hands of the 
Turks, the Mechitharists fled with their leader to 
Venice, where the Republic bestowed upon them a 
waste and desolate island, which had formerly been 
used as a place of refuge for lepers ; and the monks 
made it the loveliest spot in all the lagoons. 

The little island has such a celebrity in travel and 
romance, that I feel my pen catching in the tatters 
of a threadbare theme. And yet I love the place 
and its people so well, that I could scarcely pass it 
without mention. Every tourist who spends a week 
in Venice goes to see the convent, and every one is 
charmed with it and the courteous welcome of the 
fathers. Its best interest is the .intrinsic interest 
attaching to it as a seat of Armenian culture ; but 
persons who relish the cheap sentimentalism of 
Byron's life, find the convent all the more entertain- 
ing from the fact that he did the Armenian language 
the favor to study it there, .a little. The monks 
show his autograph, together with those of other 
distinguished persons, and the Armenian Bible which 
he used to read. I understood from one of the friars, 
Padre Giacomo Issaverdanz, that the brothers knew 
little or nothing of Byron's celebrity as a poet while 
he studied with them, and that his proficiency as an 
Armenian scholar was not such as to win high re- 
gard from them. 

I think most readers who have visited the convent 
will recall the pleasant face and manners of the 
young father mentioned, who show^s the place to 



196 VENETIAN LIFE. 

English-speaking travelers, and will care to know 
that Padre Giacomo was born at Smyrna, and dwelt 
there in the family of an English lady, till he came 
to Venice, and entered on his monastic life at San 
Lazzaro. 

He came one morning to breakfast with us, bring- 
ing with him Padre Alessio, a teacher in the Ar- 
menian College in the city. As for the latter, it was 
not without a certain shock that I heard Mesopota- 
mia mentioned as his birthplace, having somehow in 
childhood learned to regard that formidable name as 
little better than a kind of profane swearing. But I 
soon came to know Padre Alessio apart from his 
birthplace, and to find him very interesting as a 
scholar and an artist. He threw a little grace of 
poetry around our simple feast, by repeating some 
Armenian verses, — grace all the more ethereal from 
our entire ignorance of what the verses meant. Our 
breakfast-table talk wrought to friendship the ac- 
quaintance made some time before, and the next 
morning we received the photograph of Padre Gia- 
como, and the compliments of the Orient, in a 
heaped basket of ripe and luscious figs from the gar- 
den of the Convent San Lazzaro. When, in turn, 
we went to visit him at the convent, we had expe- 
rience of a more curious oriental hospitality. Re- 
freshments were offered to us as to friends, and we 
lunched fairily upon little dishes of rose leaves, deli- 
cately preserved, with all their fragrance, in a " lu- 
cent sirup." It seemed that this was a common 
conserve in the East ; but we could hardly divest 



THE ARMENIANS. 197 

ourselves of the notion of sacrilege, as we tlius fed 
upon the very most luxurious sweetness and perfume 
of the soul of summer. Pleasant talk accompanied 
the dainty repast, — Padre Giacomo recounting for 
us some of his adventures with the people whom 
he had to show about the convent, and of whom 
many were disappointed at not finding a gallery or 
museum, and went away in extreme disgust ; and 
I'elating with a sly, sarcastic relish that blent curi- 
ously with his sweetness and gentleness of spirit, how 
some English people once came with the notion that 
Lord Bj'ron was an Armenian ; how an unhappy 
French gentleman, who had been robbed in Southern 
Italy, would not be parted a moment from a huge 
bludgeon which he carried in his hand, and (prob- 
ably disordered by his troubles) could hardly be 
■persuaded from attacking the mummy which is in 
one of the halls ; how a sharp, bustling, go-ahead Yan- 
kee rushed in one morning, rubbing his hands, and 
demanding, '' Show me all you can in five minutes." 
As a seat of learning, San Lazzaro is famed through- 
out the Armenian world, and gathers under its roof 
the best scholars and poets of that nation. In the 
printing-office of the convent books are printed in 
some thirty different languages ; and a number of 
the fathers employ themselves constantly in works 
of translation. The most distinguished of the Ar- 
menian literati now living at San Lazzaro is the 
Reverend Father Gomidas Pakraduni, who has pub- 
lished an Armenian version of '^ Paradise Lost," and 
whose great labor, the translation of Homer, has 



198 VENETIAN LIFE. 

been recently issued from the convent press. He 
was born at Constantinople of an ancient and illus- 
trious family, and took religious orders at San Laz- 
zaro, where he was educated, and where for twenty- 
five years after his consecration he held the profess- 
orship of his native tongue. He devoted himself 
especially to the culture of the ancient Armenian, 
and developed it for the expression of modern ideas ; 
he made exhaustive study of the vast collection of 
old manuscripts at San Lazzaro, and then went to 
Paris in pursuance of his purpose, and acquainted 
himself with all the treasures of Armenian learning 
in the BibliothSque Royale. He became the first 
scholar of the age in his national language, and ac- 
quired at the same time a profound knowledge of 
Latin and Greek. 

Returning to Constantinople, Father Pakraduni, 
whose fame had preceded him, took up his residence 
in the family of a noble Armenian, high in the ser- 
vice of the Turkish government ; and while assum- 
ing the care of- educating his friend's children, began 
those labors of translation which have since so lar^^elv 
employed him. He made an Armenian version of 
Pindar, and wrote a work on Rhetoric, both of which 
were destroyed by fire while yet in the manuscript. 
He labored, meanwhile, on his translation of the Iliad, 
— a youthful purpose which he did not see fulfilled 
till the year 1860, when he had already touched the 
Psalmist's limit of life. In this translation he revived 
with admirable success an ancient species of Arme- 
nian verse, which bears, in flexibility and strength, 



THE ARMENIANS. 199 

comparison with the original Greek. Another of 
his great labors was the production of an Armenian 
Grammar, in which he reduced to rule and order 
the numerous forms of his native tongue, never be- 
fore presented by one work in all its eastern variety. 

Padre Giacomo, to whose great kindness I am in- 
debted for a biographic and critical notice in writing 
of Father Pakraduni, considers the epic poem by 
that scholar a far greater work than any of his philo- 
logical treatises, profound and thorough as they are. 
When nearly completed, this poem perished in the 
same conflagration which consumed the Pindar and 
the Rhetoric ; but the poet patiently began his work 
anew, and after eight years gave his epic of twenty 
books and twenty-two thousand verses to the press. 
The hero of the poem is Haik, the first Armenian 
patriarch after the flood, and the founder of a kingly 
dynasty. Nimrod, the great hunter, drunk with his 
victories, declares himself a god, and ordains his own- 
worship throughout the Orient. Haik refuses to obey 
the commands of the tyrant, takes up arms against 
him, and finally kills him in battle. " In the style of 
this poem," writes Padre Giacomo, '' it is hard to tell 
whether to admire most its richness, its energy, its 
sweetness, its melancholy, its freedom, its dignity, or 
its harmony, for it has all these virtues in turn. The 
descriptive parts are depicted with the faithfulest 
pencil : the battle scenes can only be matched in the 
Iliad." 

Father Pakraduni returned, after twenty - five 
years' sojourn at Constantinople, to publish his epic 



200 VENETIAN LIFE. 

at San Lazzaro, where he still lives, .a tranquil, gen- 
tle old man, with a patriarchal beauty and goodness 
of face. In 1861 he printed his translation of Mil- 
ton, with a dedication to Queen Victoria. His other 
works bear witness to the genuineness of his inspira- 
tion and piety, and the diligence of his study : they 
are poems, poetic translations from the Italian, re- 
ligious essays, and grammatical treatises. 

Indeed, the existence of all the friars at San Laz- 
zaro is one of close and earnest study ; and life grows 
so fond of these quiet monks that it will hardly part 
wdth them at last. One of them is ninety -five years 
old, and, until 1863, there was a lay-brother among 
them whose years numbered a hundred and eight, and 
who died of old age, on the 17th of September, after 
passing fifty-eight years at San Lazzaro. From bio- 
graphic memoranda furnished me by Padre Giacomo, 
I learn that the name of this patriarch was George 
Karabagiak, and that he was a native of Kutaieh in 
Asia Minor. He was for a long time the disciple 
of D^d§ Vartabied, a renowned preacher of the Ar- 
menian faith, and he afterward taught the doctrines 
of his master in the Armenian schools. Failing in 
his desire to enter upon the sacerdotal life at Con- 
stantinople, he procured his admission as lay-brother 
at San Lazzaro. where all his remainino; davs v/ere 
spent. He was but little learned ; but he had a 
great passion for poetry, and he was the author of 
some thirty small works on different subjects. Dur- 
ing the course of his long and diligent life, which 
was chiefly spent in learning and teaching, he may 



THE AEMENIANS. 201 

be said to have 'hardly known a day's sickness. And 
at last he died of no perceptible disorder. The years 
tired him to death. He had a trifling illness in Au- 
gust, and as he convalesced, he grew impatient of 
the tenacious life which held him to earth. Slowly 
pacing up and down the corridors of the convent, he 
used to crave the prayers of the brothers whom he 
met, beseeching them to intercede with Heaven that 
he might be suffered to die. One day he said to the 
archbishop, " I fear that God has abandoned me, and 
I shall live." Only a little wdiile before his death 
he wTote some verses, as Padre Giacomo's memoran- 
dum witnesses, " with a firm and steady hand," and 
the manner of his death was this, — as recorded in 
the grave and simple words of my friend's note : — 
" Finally, on the 17th of September, very early in 
the morning, a brother entering his chamber, asked 
him how he was. 'Well,' he replied, turning his 
face to the wall, and spoke no more. He had passed 
to a better life." 

It seems to me there is a pathos in the close of this 
old man's life, — which I hope has not been lost by 
my way of describing it, — and there is certainly a 
moral. I have read of an unlucky sage who discov- 
ered the Elixir of Life, and who, after thrice renew- 
ing his existence, at last voluntarily resigned himself 
to death, because he had exhausted all that life had 
to offer of pleasure or of pain, and knew all its vi- 
cissitudes but the very last. Brother Karabagiak 
seems to have had no humor to take even a second 
lease of life. It is perhaps as well that most men die 



202 VENETIAN LIFE. 

before reaching the over-ripeness of a hundred and 
eight years ; and, doubtless, with all our human will- 
fulness and ignorance, we would readily consent, if 
we could fix the time, to go sooner — say, at a hun- 
dred and seven years, friends ? 

Besides the Convent of San Lazzaro, where Ar- 
menian boys from all parts of the East are educated 
for the priesthood, the nation has a college in the 
city in which boys intended for secular careers re- 
ceive their schooling. The Palazzo Zenobia is de- 
voted to the use of this college, w^here, besides room 
for study, the boys have abundant space and appa- 
ratus for gymnastics, and ample grounds for garden- 
ing. We once passed a pleasant summer evening 
there, strolling through the fragrant alleys of the 
garden, in talk wdth the father-professors, and look- 
ing on at the gymnastic feats of the boys ; and 
when the annual exhibition of the school took place 
in the fall, we were invited to be present. 

The room appointed for the exhibition w^as the 
great hall of the palace, which in other days had 
evidently been a ball-room. The ceiling was fres- 
coed in the manner of the last century, with Cupids 
and Venuses, Vices and Virtues, fruits and fiddles, 
dwarfs and blackamoors ; and the painted faces 
looked down on a scene of as curious interest as ever 
the extravagant loves and graces of Tiepolo might 
hope to see, when the boys of the college, after as- 
sisting at Te Deum in the chapel, entered the room, 
and took their places. 

At the head of the hall sat the archbishop in his 



THE ARMENIANS. 203 

dark robes, with his heavy gold chain about his 
neck ~ a figure and a countenance in all things spir- 
itual, gracious, and reverend. There is small differ- 
ence, I believe, between the creeds of the Armenians 
and the Roman Catholics, but a very great disparity 
in the looks of the two priesthoods, which is all in 
favor of the former. The Armenian wears his 
beard, and the Latin shaves — which may have a 
great deal to do with the holiness of appearance. 
Perhaps, also, the gentle and mild nature of the 
oriental yields more sweetly and entirely to the self- 
denials of the ecclesiastical vocation, and thus wins 
a fairer grace from them. At any rate, I have not 
seen any thing but content and calm in the visages 
of the Armenian fathers, among whom the priest- 
face, as a type, does not exist, though it would 
mark the Romish ecclesiastic in whatever dress he 
wore. There is, moreover, a look of such entire 
confidence and unworldly sincerity in their eyes, 
that I could not help thinking, as I turned from the 
portly young fathers to the dark-faced, grave, old- 
fashioned school-boys, that an exchange of beard 
only w^as needed to effect an exchange of character 
between those youthful elders and their pupils. The 
gray-haired archbishop is a tall and slender man ; 
but nearly all the fathers take kindly to curves and 
circles, and glancing down a row of these amiable 
priests I could scarcely repress a smile at the con- 
stant recurrence of the line of beauty in their well- 
rounded persons. 

On the right and left of the archbishop were the 



204 VENETIAN LIFE. 

few invited guests, and at the other end of the saloon 
sat one of the fathers, the plump key-stone of an 
arch of comfortable young students expandmg to- 
ward us. Most of the boys are from Turkey (the 
Armenians of Venice, though acknowledging the 
Pope as their spiritual head, are the subjects of the 
Saltan), others are of Asiatic birth, and two are 
Egyptians. 

As to the last, I think the Sphinx and the Pyramid 
could hardly have impressed me more than their dark 
faces, that seemed to look vaguely on our modern 
world from the remote twilights of old, and in their 
very infancy to be reverend through the antiquity of 
their race. The mother of these boys — a black- 
eyed, olive-cheeked lady, very handsome and stylish 
— was present with their younger brother. I hardly 
know whether to be ashamed of having been awed 
by hearing of the little Egyptian that his native 
tongue w^as Arabic, and that he spoke nothing more 
occidental than Turkish. But, indeed, was it w^holly 
absurd to offer a tacit homage to this favored boy, 
who must know the "Arabian Nio-hts " in the orimnal ? 

The exercises began with a theme in Armenian — 
a language which, but for its English abundance of 
sibilants, and a certain German rhythm, was wholly 
outlandish to our ears. Themes in Italian, German, 
and French succeeded, and then came one in Eng- 
lish. We afterward had speech w^ith the author of 
this essay, who expressed the livehest passion for 
English, in the philosophy and poetry of which it 
seemed he particularly dehghted. He told us that 



THE ARMENIANS. 205 

he was a Constantinopolitan, and that in six months 
more he would complete his collegiate course, when 
he would return to his native city, and take employ- 
ment in the service of the Turkish Government. 
Many others of the Armenian students here also find 
this career open to them in the East. 

The literary exercises closed with another essay in 
Armenian ; and then the archbishop delivered, very 
gracefully and impressively, an address to the boys. 
After this, the distribution of the premiums — medals 
of silver and bronze, and books — took place at the 
desk of the archbishop. Each boy, as he advanced 
to receive his premium, knelt and touched the hand 
of the priest with his lips and forehead, — a quaint 
and pleasing ceremony which had preceded and fol- 
lowed the reading of all the themes. 

The social greetings and congratulations that now 
took place ended an entertainment throughout which 
every body was pleased, and the good-natured fathers 
seemed to be moved with a delight no less hearty 
than that of the boys themselves. Indeed, the 
ground of affection and confidence on which the lads 
and their teachers seemed to meet, was something 
very novel and attractive. We shook hands with our 
smihng friends among the padri, took leave of the 
archbishop, and then visited the studio of Padre 
Alessio, who had just finished a faithful and spirited 
portrait of monsignore. Adieux to the artist and to 
Padre Giacomo brought our visit to an end ; and 
so, from that scene of oriental learning, simplicity, 
and kindliness, wo walked into our western life once 



206 VENETIAN LIFE. 

more, and resumed our citizenship and burden in the 
Venetian world — out of the waters of which, hke 
a hydra or other water beast, a bathing boy instantly 
issued and begged of us. 

A few days later our good Armenians went to pass 
a month on the main-land near Padua, where they 
have comfortable possessions. Peace followed them, 
and they came back as plump as they went. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE* 

As I think it extremely questionable whether I 
could get through a chapter on this subject without 
some feeble pleasantry about Shylock, and whether, 
if I did, the reader would be at all satisfied that I had 
treated the matter fully and fairly, I say at the be- 
ginning that Shylock is dead ; that if he lived, Antonio 
would hardly spit upon his gorgeous pantaloons or his 
Parisian coat, as he met him on the Rialto ; that he 
would far rather call out to him, " Cid Shylock ! Bon 
di ! Gfo piaser vederla ; " ^ that if Shylock by any 
chance entrapped Antonio into a foolish promise to 
pay him a pound of his flesh on certain conditions, 
the honest commissary of police before whom they 
brought their affair would dismiss them both to the 
madhouse at San Servolo. In a word, the present 
social relations of Jew and Christian in this citj^ ren- 
der the '' Merchant of Venice " quite impossible ; 
and the reader, though he will find the Ghetto suffi- 
ciently noisome and dirty, will not find an oppressed 
people there, nor be edified by any of those insults or 
beatings which it was once a large share of Christian 
duty to inflict upon the enemies of our faith. The 
^ ** Shylock, old fellow, good-day. Glad to see you/* 



208 VENETIAN LIFE. 

Catholic Venetian certainly understands that his 
Jewish fellow-citizen is destined to some very un- 
pleasant experiences in the next world, but Corpo di 
Bacco ! that is no reason why he should not be friends 
with him in this. He meets him daily on exchange 
and at the Casino, and he partakes of the hospitality 
of his conversazioni. If he still despises him — and 
I think he does, a little — he keeps his contempt to 
himself, for the Jew is gathering into his own hands 
great part of the trade of the city, and has the power 
that belongs to wealth. He is educated, liberal, and 
enlightened, and the last great name in Venetian lit- 
erature is that of the Jew^ish historian of the Repub- 
lic, Romanin. The Jew's political sympathies are in- 
variably patriotic, and he calls himself, not Ebreo, but 
Veneziano. He lives, wiien rich, in a palace or a 
fine house on the Grand Canal, and he furnishes and 
lets many others (I must say at rates which savor of 
the loan secured by the pound of flesh) in which 
he does not live. The famous and beautiful Ca' 
Doro now belongs to a Jewish family ; and an Is- 
raelite, the most distinguished physician in Venice, 
occupies the appartamento signorile in the palace of 
the famous Cardinal Bembo. The Jew is a physi- 
cian, a banker, a manufacturer, a merchant ; and he 
makes himself respected for his intelligence and his 
probity, — which perhaps does not infringe more 
than that of Italian Catholics, He dresses well, — 
with that indefinable difference, however, which dis- 
tinguishes him in every thing from a Christian, — and 
his wife and daughter are fashionable and stylish. 



THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OP VENICE. 209 

They are sometimes, also, very pretty ; and I have 
seen one Jewish lady who might have stepped out of 
the sacred page, down from the patriarchal age, and 
been known for Rebecca, with her oriental grace, and 
delicate, sensitive, high-bred look and bearing — no 
more western and modern than a lily of Palestine. 

But it is to the Ghetto I want to take you now (by 
the way we went one sunny day late last fall), that 
I may show you something of the Jewish past, which 
has survived to the nineteenth century in much of 
the discomfort and rank savor of the dark ages. 

In the fifteenth century all the riches of the Orient 
had been poured into the lap of Venice, and a spirit 
of reckless profusion took possession of her citizens. 
The money, hastily and easily amassed, went as 
rapidly as it came. It went chiefly for dress, in 
which the Venetian still indulges very often to the 
stint of his stomach ; and the ladies of that bright- 
colored, showy day bore fortunes on their delicate 
persons in the shape of costly vestments of scarlet, 
black, green, wdiite, maroon, or violet, covered with 
gems, glittering with silver buttons, and ringing with 
silver bells. The fine gentlemen of the period were 
not behind them in extravagance ; and the priests 
were peculiarly luxurious in dress, wearing gay silken 
robes, with cowls of fur, and girdles of gold and 
silver. Sumptuary laws were vainly passed to re- 
press the general license, and fortunes were wasted, 
and wealthy families reduced to beggary.* At this 
time, when so many worthy gentlemen and ladies 

^ Galliciolli, Memorie Venete. 
U 



210 VENETIAN LIFE. 

had need of the Uncle to whom hard-pressed 
nephews fly to pledge the wrecks of prosperity, there 
was yet no Monte di Pieta, and the demand for 
pawnbrokers becoming imperative, the Republic was 
obliged to recall the Hebrews from the exile into 
which they had been driven some time before, that 
they might set up pawnshops and succor necessity. 
They came back, however, only for a limited time, 
and were obliged to wear a badge of yellow color 
upon the breast, to distinguish them from the Chris- 
tians, and later a yellow cap, then a red hat, and 
then a hat of oil-cloth. They could not acquire 
houses or lands in Venice, nor practice any trade, 
nor exercise any noble art but medicine. They 
were assigned a dwelling-place in the vilest and 
unhealthiest part of the city, and their quarter was 
called Ghetto, from the Hebrew^ nghedah^ a congre- 
gation.* They were obliged to pay their landlords 
a third more rent than Christians paid ; the Ghetto 
was walled in, and its gates were kept by Christian 
guards, who every day opened them at dawn and 
closed them at dark, and who were paid by the Jews. 
They were not allowed to issue at all from the Ghetto 
on holidays ; and two barges, with armed men, 
watched over them night and day, while a special 
magistracy had charge of their affairs. Their syna- 
gogues were built at Mestre, on the main-land ; and 
their dead were buried in the sand upon the sea- 
shore, whither, on the Mondays of September, the 
baser sort of Venetians went to make merry, and 
^ Mutinelli. 



THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE. 211 

drunken men and women danced above their dese- 
crated tombs. These unhappy people were forced 
also to pay tribute to the state at first every third 
year, then every fifth year, and then every tenth 
year, the privilege of residence being ingeniously re- 
newed to them at these periods for a round sum ; but, 
in spite of all, they flourished upon the waste and 
wickedness of their oppressors, waxed rich as these 
waxed poor, and were not again expelled from the 
city.* 

There never was any attempt to disturb the He- 
brews by violence, except on one occasion, about the 
close of the fifteenth century, when a tumult was 
raised against them for child-murder. This, how- 
ever, was promptly quelled by the Republic before 
any harm was done them ; and they dwelt peacefully 
in their Ghetto till the lofty gates of their prison 
caught the sunlight of modern civilization, and crum- 
bled beneath it. Then many of the Jews came forth 
and fixed their habitations in different parts of the 
city, but many others clung to the spot where their 
temples still remain, and which was hallowed by long 
suffering, and soaked with the blood of innumerable 
generations of geese. So, although you find Jews 
everywhere in Venice, you never find a Christian 
in the Ghetto, which is held to this day by a large 
Hebrew population. 

We had not started purposelj'- to see the Ghetto, 
and for this reason it had that purely incidental 
relish, which is the keenest possible savor of the 

-* Del Commerdo dei Veneziant. Mutinelli. 



212 VENETIAN LIFE. 

object of interest. We were on an expedition to 
find Sior Antonio Rioba, who has been, from time 
immemorial, the means of ponderous practical jokes 
in Venice. Sior Antonio is a rough-hewn statue set 
in the corner of an ordinary grocery, near the Ghetto. 
He has a pack on his back and a staff in his hand ; 
his face is painted, and is habitually dishonored with 
dirt thrown upon it by boys. On the wall near him 
is painted a bell-pull, with the legend, Sior Antonio 
Rioha. Rustics, raw apprentices, and honest Ger- 
mans new to the city, are furnished with packages 
to be carried to Sior Antonio Rioba, who is very 
hard to find, and not able to receive the messages 
when found, though there is always a crowd of 
loafers near to receive the unlucky simpleton who 
brings them. " E poi^ die commedia vederli arra- 
Mar si ! Che rider e ! " That is the Venetian notion 
of fun, and no doubt the scene is amusing. I was 
curious to see Sior Antonio, because a comic journal 
bearing his name had been published during the 
time of the Republic of 1848, and from the fact 
that he was then a sort of Venetian Pasquino. But 
I question now if he was w^orth seeing, except as 
somethincT that brouo-ht me into the neio;hborhood 
of the Ghetto, and suggested to me the idea of visit- 
ing that quarter. 

As we left him and passed up the canal in our 
gondola, we came unawares upon the church of Santa 
Maria dell' Orto, one of the most graceful Gothic 
churches in the city. The fagade is exquisite, and 
has two Gothic windows of that religious and heav- 



THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE. 213 

enlj beauty Avliicli pains the heart with its inexhaust- 
ible richness. One longed to fall down on the space 
of green turf before the church, now bathed in the 
soft golden October sunshine, and recant these happy, 
commonplace centuries of heresy, and have back 
again the good old believing days of bigotry, and 
superstition, and roasting, and racking, if only to 
have once more the men who dreamed those win- 
dows out of their faith and piety (if they did, which 
I doubt), and made them with their patient, rever- 
ent hands (if their hands were reverent, which I 
doubt). The church is called Santa Maria delF Orto, 
from the miraculous image of Our Lady which was 
found in an orchard where the temple now stands. 
We saw this miraculous sculpture, and thought it re- 
flected little credit upon the supernatural artist. The 
church is properly that of Saint Christopher, but the 
saint has been titularly vanquished by the Madonna, 
though he comes out gigantically triumphant in a 
fresco above the high altar, and leads to confused 
and puzzling reminiscences of Bluebeard and Mor- 
gante Maggiore, to both of which characters he bears 
a bewildering personal resemblance. 

There were once many fine paintings by Tinto- 
retto and Bellini in this church ; but as the interior 
is now in course of restoration, the paintings have 
been removed to the Academy, and we only saw one, 
which was by the former master, and had all his strik- 
ing imagination in the conception, all his strength in 
the drawing and all his lampblack in the faded col- 
oring. In the centre of the church, the sacristan 



214 VENETIAN LIFE. 

scraped the carpenter's rubbish away from a flat 
tablet in the floor, and said that it was Tintoretto's 
tomb. It is a sad thing to doubt even a sacristan, 
but I pointed out that the tomb bore any name in 
the world rather than Robusti. " Ah ! " said the 
sacristan, '' it is just that which makes it so very 
curious, — that Tintoretto should wish to be buried 
under another name ! " * 

It was a warm, sunny day in the fall, as I said ; 
yet as we drew near the Ghetto, we noticed in the 
air many white, floating particles, like lazy, strag- 
gling flakes of snow. These we afterward found 
to be the down of multitudes of geese, which are 
forever plucked by the w^hole apparent force of 
the populace, — the fat of the devoted birds being 
substituted for lard in the kitchens of the Ghetto, 
and their flesh for pork. As we approached the ob- 
scene little riva at which we landed, a blond young 
Israelite, lavishly adorned with feathers, came run- 
ning to know if we wished to see the church — by 
which name he put the synagogue to the Gentile 
comprehension. The street through which w^e passed 
had shops on either hand, and at the doors groups 
of jocular Hebrew youth sat plucking geese ; while 
within, long files of all that was mortal of geese 
hung from the rafters and the walls. The ground 
was webbed with the feet of geese, and certain lout- 
ish boys, who paused to look at us, had each a goose 

^ Members of the family of Tintoretto are actually buried in 
this churcli ; and no sacristan of right feeling could do less than 
point out some tomb as that of the great painter himself. 



THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OF VENICE. 215 

dragging at his heels, in the forlorn and elongated 
manner peculiar to dead poultry. The ground was 
stained with the blood of geese, and the smell of 
roasting geese came out of the windows of the grim 
and lofty houses. 

Our guide was picturesque, but the most helpless 
and inconclusive cicerone I ever knew" ; and while 
his long, hooked Hebrew nose caught my idle fancy, 
and his soft blue eyes excused a great deal of ineffi- 
ciency, the aimless fashion in which he mounted 
dirty staircases for the keys of the synagogue, and 
came down without them, and the manner in which 
he shouted to the heads of unctuous Jessicas thrust 
out of windows, and never gained the slightest in- 
formation by his efforts, were imbecilities that we 
presently found insupportable, and w^e gladly cast 
him off for a dark-faced Hebrew boy who brought 
us at once to the door of the Spanish synagogue. 

Of seven synagogues in the Ghetto, the prin- 
cipal was built in 1655, by the Spanish Jews who 
had fled to Venice from the terrors of the Holy 
Office. Its exterior has nothing to distinguish it as 
a place of worship, and we reached the interior of 
the temple by means of some dark and narrow stairs. 
In the floor and on the walls of the passage-way 
were set tablets to the memory of rich and pious 
Israelites who had bequeathed their substance for the 
behoof of the sanctuary ; and the sacristan informed 
us that the synagogue was also endowed with a fund 
by rich descendants of Spanish Jews in Amsterdam. 
These moneys are kept to furnish indigent Israel- 



216 VENETIAN LIFE. 

itish couples with the means of marrying, and any 
who claim the benefit of the fund are entitled to it. 
The sacristan — a little wiry man, with bead-black 
eyes, and of a shoemakerish presence — told us with 
evident pride that he was himself a descendant of 
the Spanish Jews. Howbeit, he was now many 
centuries from speaking the Castihan, which, I had 
read, was still used in the families of the Jewish 
fugitives from Spain to the Levant. He spoke, in- 
stead, the abominable Venetian of Cannaregio, with 
that Jewish thickness which distinguishes the race's 
utterance, no matter what language its children are 
born to. It is a curious philological fact, which I 
have heard repeatedly alleged by Venetians, and 
which is perhaps worth noting here, that Jews speak- 
ing their dialect, have not only this thickness of ac- 
cent, but also a peculiarity of construction which 
marks them at once. 

We found the contracted interior of the syna- 
gogue hardly worth looking at. Instead of having 
any thing oriental or peculiar in its architecture, it 
was in a bad spirit of Renaissance art. A gallery 
encircled the inside, and here the women, during 
worship, sat apart from the men, who had seats be- 
low, running back from either side of the altar. I 
had no right, coming from a Protestant land of pews, 
to indulge in that sentimentality; but I could, not 
help being offended to see that each of these seats 
might be lifted up and locked into the upright back, 
and thus placed beyond question at the disposal of 
the owner : I like the freedom and equality in 



THE GHETTO AND THE JEWS OP VENICE. 21T 

the Catholic churches much better. The sacristan 
brought a ponderous silver key, and unlocking 
the door behind the pulpit, showed us the Hebrew 
Scriptures used during the service by the Rabbi. 
They formed an immense parchment volume, and 
were rolled in silk upon a wooden staff. This was 
the sole object of interest in the synagogue, and its 
inspection concluded our visit. 

We descended the narrow stairs and emerged 
upon the piazza which we had left. It was only 
partly paved with brick, and was very dirty. The 
houses which surrounded it were on the outside old 
and shabby, and, even in this Venice of lofty edi- 
fices, remarkably high. A wooden bridge crossed a 
vile canal to another open space, where once con- 
gregated the merchants who sell antique furniture, 
old pictures, and objects of vertu. They are now, 
however, found everywhere in the city, and most 
of them are on the Grand Canal, where they heap 
together marvelous collections, and establish authen- 
ticities beyond cavil. " Is it an original ? " asked a 
young lady who was visiting one of their shops, as 
she paused before an attributive Veronese, or — 
what know I ? — perhaps a Titian. " Si^ signora^ 
originalissimo ! " 

I do not understand why any class of Jews should 
still remain in the Ghetto, but it is certain, as I said, 
that they do remain there in great numbers. It may 
be that the impurity of the place and the atmosphere 
is conducive to purity of race ; but I question if the 
Jews buried on the sandy slope of the Lido, and 



218 VENETIAN LIFE. 

blown over by the sweet sea wind — it must needs 
blow many centuries to cleanse them of the Ghetto 
— are not rather to be envied by the inhabitants of 
those high dirty houses and low dirty lanes. There 
was not a touch of any thing wholesome, or pleasant, 
or attractive, to relieve the noisomeness of the 
Ghetto to its visitors ; and they applauded, wath a 
common voice, the neatness which had prompted 
Andrea the gondolier to roll up the carpet from the 
floor of his gondola, and not to spread it again within 
the limits of that quarter. 

In the good old times, when pestilence avenged 
the poor and oppressed upon their oppressors, what 
grim and dismal plagues may not have stalked by 
night and noonday out of those hideous streets, and 
passed the marble bounds of patrician palaces, and 
brought to the bedsides of the rich and proud the 
filthy misery of the Ghetto turned to poison ! Thank 
God that the good old times are gone and going ! 
One learns in these aged lands to hate and execrate 
the past. 



CHAPTER XV. 

SOME MEMORABLE PLACES. 

We came away from the Ghetto, as we had ar- 
rived, in a gentle fall of goose-down, and winding 
crookedly through a dirty canal, glided into purer 
air and cleaner waters. I cannot well say how it 
was w^e came upon the old Servite Convent, w^hich I 
had often looked for in vain, and which, associated 
with the great name of Paolo Sarpi, is to me one of 
the most memorable places in Venice. We reached 
it, after passing by that old, old palace, which was 
appointed in the early ages of Venetian commerce 
for the reception of oriental traffic and traffickers, 
and where it is said the Moorish merchants resided 
till the later time of the Fondaco dei Turchi on the 
Grand Canal. The fagade of the palace is richly 
sculptured ; and near one corner is the bass-relief of 
a camel and his turbaned driver, — in token, perhaps, 
that man and beast (as orientals would understand 
them) were here entertained. 

We had lived long enough in Venice to know 
that it was by no means worth while to explore the 
interior of this old palace because the outside w^as 
attractive, and so ^Ye left it ; and turning a corner, 
found ourselves in a shallow canal, with houses on 



220 VENETIAN LIFE. 

one side, and a grassy bank on the other. The 
bank sloped gently from the water up to the walls 
of some edifice, on which ruin seemed to have 
fastened soon after the architect had begun his work. 
The vast walls, embracing several acres in their close, 
rose only some thirty or forty feet from the ground 
— only high enough, indeed, to join over the top of 
the great Gothic gates, which pierced them on two 
fagades. There must have been barracks near ; for 
on the sward, under the walls, muskets were stacked, 
and Austrian soldiers were practicing the bayonet- 
exercise with long poles padded at the point. '' JSin^ 
zivei^ drei^ — vorivdrts ! Ein^ zivei^ drei^ — ruck" 
warts !'^^ snarled the drill-sergeant, and the dark- 
faced Hungarian soldiers — who may have soon 
afterward prodded their Danish fellow-beings all the 
more effectively for that day's training — stooped, 
writhed, and leaped obedient. I, who had already 
caught sight of a little tablet in the wall bearing the 
name of Paolo Sarpi, could not feel the propriety 
of the military performance on that scene ; yet I 
was very glad, dismounting from the gondola, to get 
by the soldiers without being forced back at the 
padded point of a pole, and offered no audible ob- 
jection to their presence. 

So passing to the other side, I found entrance 
through a disused chapel to the interior of the con- 
vent. The gates on the outside were richly sculpt- 
ured, and were reverend and clean ; tufts of harsh 
grass grew from their arches, and hung down like 
the " overwhelming brows " of age. Within, at first 



SOME MEMORABLE PLACES. 221 

Sight, I saw nothing but heaps of rubbish, piles of 
stone, and here and there a mutilated statue. I re- 
member two pathetic caryatides, that seemed to have 
broken and sunk under too heavy a weight for their 
gentle beauty — and everywhere the unnamable filth 
with which ruin is always dishonored in Italy, and 
which makes the most picturesque and historic places 
inaccessible to the foot, and intolerable to the senses 
and the soul. I was thinking with a savage indig- 
nation on this incurable porcheria of the Italian poor 
(who are guilty of such desecrations), when my eye 
fell upon an enclosed space in one corner, where 
some odd-looking boulders were heaped together. 
It was a space about six feet in depth, and twenty 
feet square ; and the boulders, on closer inspection, 
turned out to be human skulls, nestling on piles of 
human bones. In any other land than Italy I think 
I should have turned from the grisly sight with a 
cowardly sickness and shuddering ; but here ! — 
Why, heaven and earth seem to take the loss of men 
so good-naturedly, — so many men have died and 
passed away with their difficult, ambitious, and 
troublesome little schemes, — and the great mass of 
mankind is taken so small account of in the course 
of destiny, that the idea of death does not appear so 
alien and repulsive as elsewhere, and the presence 
of such evidences of our poor mortality can scarcely 
offend sensibility. These were doubtless the bones 
of the good Servite friars who had been buried in 
their convent, and had been digged up to make way 
for certain improvements now taking place within its 



222 VENETIAN LIFE. 

walls. I have no doubt that their deaths were a 
rest to their bodies, to say nothing of their souls. 
If they were at all in their lives like those who have 
come after them, the sun baked their bald brows in 
summer, and their naked feet — poor feet ! clapping 
round in wooden-soled sandals over the frozen stones 
of Venice — were swollen and gnawed with chil- 
blains in winter; and no doubt some fat friar of 
their number, looking all the droller in his bare feet 
for the spectacles on his nose, came down Calle 
Falier then, as now, to collect the charity of bread 
and fuel, far oftener than the dwellers in that aristo- 
cratic precinct wished to see him. 

The friars' skulls looked contented enough, and 
smiled after the hearty manner of skulls ; and some 
of the leo;-bones were thrust throuo;h the enclosing: 
fence, and hung rakishly over the top. As to their 
spirits, I suppose they must have found out by this 
time that these confused and shattered tabernacles 
which they left behind them are not nearly so cor- 
rupt and dead as the monastic system which still 
cumbers the earth. People are building on the site 
of the old convent a hospital for indigent and de- 
crepit women, where a religious sisterhood will have 
care of the inmates. It is a good end enough, but 
I think it would be the true compensation if all the 
rubbish of the old cloister were cleared from the 
area of those walls, and a great garden planted in 
the space, where lovers might whisper their wise 
nonsense, and children might romp and frolic, till 
the crumbling masonry forgot its old office of im- 



SOME MEMORABLE PLACES. 223 

prisonment and the memory of its prisoners. For 
here, one could only think of the moping and mum- 
ming herd of monks, who were certainly not worth 
remembering, while the fame of Paolo Sarpi, and the 
good which he did, refused to be localized. That 
good is an inheritance which has enriched the world ; 
but the share of Venice has been comparatively 
small in it, and that of this old convent ground still 
less. I rather wondered, indeed, that I should have 
taken the trouble to look up the place ; but it is a 
harmless, if even a very foolish, pastime to go seek- 
ing for the sublime secret of the glory of the palm 
in the earth where it struck root and flourished. So 
far as the life-long presence and the death of a man 
of clear brain and true heart could hallow any scene, 
this ground was holy ; for here Sarpi lived, and liQre 
in his cell he died, a simple Servite friar — he who 
had caught the bolts of excommunication launched 
against the Republic from Rome, and broken them 
in his hand, — wdio had breathed upon the mighty 
arm of the temporal power, and withered it to the 
juiceless stock it now remains. And yet I could 
not feel that the ground was holy, and it did not 
make me think of Sarpi ; and I believe that only those 
travelers who invent in cold blood their impressions 
of memorable places ever have remarkable impres- 
sions to record. 

Once, before the time of Sarpi, an excommunica- 
tion was pronounced against the Republic with a re- 
sult as terrible as that of the 'later interdict was ab- 
surd. Venice took possession, early in the fourteenth 



224 VENETIAN LIFE. 

century, of Ferrara, by virtue of a bargain which the 
high contracting parties — the Republic and an exiled 
claimant to the ducal crown of Ferrara — had no rio;ht 
to make. The father of the banished prince had dis- 
pleased him by marrying late in hfe, when the thoughts 
of a good man should be turned on other things, and 
the son compassed the sire's death. For this the 
Ferrarese drove him aw^ay, and as they would not take 
him back to reign over them at the suggestion of 
Venice, he resigned his rights in favor of the Repub- 
lic, and the Republic at once annexed the city to its 
territories. The Ferrarese appealed to the pope for 
his protection, and Clement V., supporting an ancient 
but long quiescent claim to Ferrara on the part of 
the Church, called upon the Venetians to surrender 
the city, and, on their refusal, excommimicated them. 
All Christian peoples were commanded "to arm 
against the Venetians, to spoil them of their goods, 
as separated from the union of Christians, and as 
enemies of the Roman Church." They were driven 
out of Ferrara, but their troubles did not end with 
their loss of the city. Giustina Renier-Michiel says 
the nations, under the shelter of the pope's permis- 
sion and command, " exercised against them every 
species of cruelty ; there was no wrong or violence 
of which they were not victims. All the rich mer- 
chandise which they had in France, in Flanders, and 
in other places, was confiscated ; their merchants 
were arrested, maltreated, and some of them killed. 
Woe to us, if the Saracens had been baptized 
Christians ! our nation would have been utterlv de- 



SOME MEMORABLE PLACES. 225 

stroyed. Such was tlie rum brought upon us by this 
excommunication that to this day it is a popular say- 
ing, concerning a man of gloomy aspect, ' He looks as 
if he were hringing the excommunication of Ferrara,'^ " 

No proverb, sprung from the popular terror, 
commemorates the interdict of the Republic which 
took place in 1606, and which, I believe, does not 
survive in popular recollection at Venice. It was at 
first a collision of the Venetian and Papal authorities 
at Ferrara, and then an interference of the pope to 
prevent the execution of secular justice upon certain 
ecclesiastical offenders in Venetia, which resulted in 
the excommunication of the Republic, and finally in 
the defeat of St. Peter and the triumph of St. Mark. 
Chief among the ecclesiastical offenders mentioned 
were the worthy Abbate Brandolino of Narvesa, who 
was accused, among other things, of poisoning his 
own father ; and the good Canonico Saraceni of Vi- 
cenza, who was repulsed in overtures made to his 
beautiful cousin, and who revenged himself by defam- 
ing her character, and " filthily defacing " the doors 
of her palace. The abbate was arrested, and the 
canon, on this lady's complaint to the Ten at Ven- 
ice, was thrown into prison, and the weak and 
furious Pope Paul V., being refused their release 
by the Ten, excommunicated the whole Republic. 

In the same year, that is to say 1552, the bane 
and antidote, Paul the Pope and Paul Sarpi the 
friar, were sent into the world. The latter grew in 
piety, fame, and learning, and at the time the former 
began his quarrel with the Republic, there was none 

15 



226 VENETIAN LIFE. 

in Venice so fit and prompt as Sarpi to stand fortii in 
her defense. He was at once taken into the service 
of St. Mark, and his clear, acute mind fashioned the 
spiritual weapons of the Repubhc, and helped to 
shape the secular measures taken to annul the inter- 
dict. As soon as the bull of excommunication was 
issued, the Eepublic instructed her officers to stop 
every copy of it at the frontier, and it was never read 
in any church in the Venetian dominions. The 
Senate refused to receive it from the Papal Nuncio. 
All priests, monks, and other servants of the Church, 
as well as all secular persons, w^ere commanded to 
disregard it ; and refractory ecclesiastics were forced 
to open their churches on pain of death. The Jesuits 
and Capuchins were banished ; and clerical intriguers, 
whom Rome sent in swarms to corrupt social and 
family relations, by declaring an end of civil govern- 
ment in Venice, and preaching among women dis- 
obedience to patriotic husbands and fathers, w^ere 
severely punished. With internal safety thus pro- 
vided for, the Republic intrusted her moral, relig- 
ious, and political defense entirely to Sarpi, who 
devoted himself to his trust with fidelity, zeal, and 
power. 

It might have been expected that the friend of 
Galileo, and the most learned and enhghtened man 
of his country, w^ould have taken the short and de- 
cisive method of discardino- all allecriance to Rome 
as the most logical resistance to the unjust interdict. 
But the Venetians have ever been faithful Catholics,* 

* It is convenient here to attest the truth of certain views of 



SOME MEMORABLE PLACES. 227 

and Sarpi was (or, according to the papal writers, 
seemed to be) a sincere and obedient Servite friar, 
believing in the spiritual supremacy of the pope, and 
revering the religion of Rome. He therefore fought 
Paul inside of the Church, and his writings on the 
interdict remain the monument of his polemical suc- 
cess. He was the heart and brain of the Repubhc's 
whole resistance, — he supplied her with inexhaust- 
ible reasons and answers, — and, though tempted, 
accused, and threatened, he never swerved from his 
fidelity to her. 

As he was the means of her triumph,* he re- 
religious sentiment in Italy, which Mr. Trollope, in his Paul the 
Pope and Paul the Friar, quotes from an " Italian author, by no 
means friendly to Catholicism, and very well qualified to speak of 
the progress of opinions and tendencies among his fellow-country- 
men." This author is Bianchi Giovini, who, speaking of modern 
Catholicism as the heir of the old materialistic paganism, says : 
" The Itahans have identified themselves with this mode of re- 
ligion. Cultivated men find in it the truth there is in it, and the 
people find what is agreeable to them. But both the former and 
the latter approve it as conformable to the national character. 
And whatever may be the religious system which shall govern our 
descendants twenty centuries hence, I venture to afiirm that the 
exterior forms of it will be pretty nearly the same as those which 
prevail at present, and which did prevail twenty centuries ago." 
Mr. Trollope generously dissents from the ^'pessimism *' of these 
views. The views are discouraging for some reasons ; but, with 
considerable disposition and fair opportunity to observe Italian 
character in this respect, I had arrived at precisly these conclu- 
sions. I wish here to state that in my slight sketch of Sarpi and 
his times I have availed myself freely of Mr. Trollope's delightful 
book — it is near being too much of a good thing — named above. 

^ The triumph was such only so far as the successful resistance 
to the interdict was concerned; for at the intercession of the Cath- 
olic powers the Eepublic gave up the ecclesiastical prisoners, and 



228 ^ VENETIAN LIFE. 

mained the object of her love. He could never be 
persuaded to desert his cell in the Minorite Convent 
for the apartments appointed him by the State ; and 
even when his busy days were spent in council at the 
Ducal Palace, he returned each night to sleep in the 
cloister. After the harmless interdict had been re- 
moved by Paul, and the unyielding Republic for- 
given, the wrath of Rome remained kindled against 
the friar whose logic had been too keen for the last 
reason of popes. He had been tried for heresy in 
his youth at Milan, and acquitted ; again, during 
the progress of St. Mark's quarrel with Rome, his 
orthodoxy had been questioned ; and now that all 
was over, and Rome could turn her attention to one 
particular offender, he was entreated, coaxed, com- 
manded to come to her, and put her heart at rest 
concerning these old accusations. But Sarpi was 
very well in Venice. He had been appointed Con- 
suitor in Theology to the Republic, and had received 
free admission to the secret archives of the State, — 
a favor, till then, never bestowed on any. So he 
would not go to Rome, and Rome sent assassins to 
take his life. One evening, as he was returning from 
the Ducal Palace in company with a lay-brother of 
the convent, and an old patrician, very infirm and 
helpless, he was attacked by these nuncios of the 
papal court : one of them seized the lay-brother, and 
another the patrician, while a third dealt Sarpi in- 
allowed all the banished priests except the Jesuits to return. The 
Venetians utterly refused to perform any act of humiliation or 
penance. The interdict had been defied, and it remained despised. 



SOME MEMORABLE PLACES. 229 

numerable dagger thrusts. He fell as if dead, and 
the ruffians made off in the confusion. 

Sarpi had been fearfully wounded, but he recov- 
ered. The action of the Republic in this affair is a 
comforting refutation of the saying that Republics 
are ungrateful, and the common belief that Venice 
was particularly so. The most strenuous and un- 
precedented efforts were made to take the assassins, 
and the most terrific penalties were denounced 
against them. What was much better, new honors 
were showered upon Sarpi, and extraordinary and 
affectionate measures were taken to provide for his 
safety. 

And, in fine, he lived in the service of the Re- 
public, revered and beloved, till his seventieth year, 
when he died with zeal for her good shaping his last 
utterance : " I must go to St. Mark, for it is late, 
and I have much to do." 

Brave Sarpi, and brave Republic ! Men cannot 
honor them enough. For though the terrors of the 
interdict were doubted to be harmless even at that 
time, it had remained for them to prove the interdict, 
then and forever, an instrument as obsolete as the 
catapult. 

1 was so curious as to make some inquiry among 
the workmen on the old convent ground, whether 
any stone or other record commemorative of Sarpi 
had been found in the demolished cells. I hoped, 
not very confidently, to gather some trace of his 
presence there — to have, perhaps, the spot on which 
he died shown me. To a man, they were utterly 



230 VENETIAN LIFE. 

ignorant of Sarpi, while affecting, in the Itahan 
manner, to be perfectly informed on the snbject. I 
was passed, with my curiosity, from one to another, 
till I fell into the hands of a kind of foreman, to 
whom I put my questions anew. He was a man of 
Napoleonic beard, and such fair red-and- white com- 
plexion that he impressed me as having escaped from 
a show of wax-works, and I was not at all surprised 
to find him a wax figure in point of intelligence. 
He seemed to think my questions the greatest mis- 
fortunes which had ever befallen him, and to regard 
each suggestion of Sarpi — tempo della Repubhlica 
— scomunica di Paolo Quinto — as an intolerable 
oppression. He could only tell me that on a cer- 
tain spot (which he pointed out with his foot) in 
the demolished church, there had been found a stone 
with Sarpi's name upon it. The padrone, who had 
the contract for building the new convent, had said, 
— '' Truly, I have heard speak of this Sarpi; " but 
the stone had been broken, and he did not know 
what had become of it. 

And, in fact, the only thing that remembered 
Sarpi, on the site of the convent where he spent his 
life, died, and was buried, was the little tablet on 
the outside of the wall, of which the abbreviated 
Latin announced that he had been Theologue to the 
Republic, and that his dust was now removed to the 
island of San Michele. After this failure, I had no 
humor to make researches for the bridge on which 
the friar was attacked by his assassins. But, indeed, 
why should I look for it ? Finding it, could I have 



SOME MEMORABLE PLACES. 231 

kept in my mind the fine dramatic picture I now 
have, of Sarpi returning to his convent on a mild 
October evening, weary with his long walk from St. 
Mark's, and pacing with downcast eyes, — the old 
patrician and the lay-brother at his side, and the 
masked and stealthy assassins, with uplifted daggers, 
behind him ? Nay, I fear I should have found the 
bridge with some scene of modern life upon it, and 
brought away in my remembrance an old woman 
with an oil-bottle, or a straggling boy with a tumbler, 
and a very little wine in it. 

On our way home from the Servite Convent, we 
stopped again near the corner and bridge of Sior 
Antonio Rioba, — this time to go into the house of 
Tintoretto, which stands close at the right hand, on 
the same quay. The house, indeed, might make 
some pretensions to be called a palace : it is large, 
and has a carved and balconied front, in which are 
set a now illegible tablet describing it as the paint- 
er's dwelling, and a medallion portrait of Robusti. 
It would have been well if I had contented myself 
with this goodly outside ; for penetrating, by a long 
narrow passage and complicated stairway, to the 
interior of the house, I found that it had nothing to 
offer me but the usual number of commonplace 
rooms in the usual bhghting state of restoration. I 
must say that the people of the house, considering 
they had nothing in the world to show me, were 
kind and patient under the intrusion, and answered 
with very polite affirmation my discouraged inquiry 
if this were really Tintoretto's house. 



232 VENETIAN LIFE. 

Their conduct was different from that of the 
present inmates of Titian's house, near the Fonda- 
menta Nuove, in a Httle court at the left of the 
church of the Jesuits. These unreasonable persons 
think it an intolerable bore that the enlightened 
traveling public should break in upon their privacy. 
They put their heads out of the upper windows, 
and assure the strangers that the house is as utterly 
restored within as they behold it without (and it is 
extremely restored), that it merely occupies the site 
of the painter's dwelling, and that there is nothing 
whatever to see in it. I never myself had the heart 
to force an entrance after these protests ; but an ac- 
quaintance of the more obdurate sex, whom I had 
the honor to accompany thither, once did so, and 
came out with a story of rafters of the original Ti- 
tianic kitchen being still visible in the new one. After 
a lapse of two years I revisited the house, and found 
that so far from having learned patience by frequent 
trial, the inmates had been apparently goaded into 
madness during the interval. They seemed to know 
of our approach by instinct, and thrust their heads 
out, ready for protest, before we were near enough 
to speak. The lazy, frowzy women, the worthless 
men, and idle, loafing boys of the neighborhood, 
gathered round to witness the encounter ; but though 
repeatedly commanded to ring (I was again in com- 
pany with ladies), and try to force the place, I 
refused decidedly to do so. The garrison were 
strengthening their position by plastering and re- 
newed renovation, and I doubt that by this time the 



SOME MEMORABLE PLACES. 233 

original rafters are no longer to be seen. A plas- 
terer's boy, with a fine sense of humor, stood clap- 
ping his trowel on his board, inside the house, while 
we d^ebated retreat, and derisively invited us to en- 
ter : " Suoni pure^ signore I Questa e la famosa 
casa del gran pittore^ Vimmortale Tiziano^ — suoni^ 
signore r^ (Ring, by all means, sir. This is the 
famous house of the great painter, the immortal Ti- 
tian. Ring !) Da capo. We retired amid the scorn 
of the populace. But indeed I could not blame the 
inhabitants of Titian's house ; and were I condemned 
to live in a place so famous as to attract idle curi- 
osity, flushed and insolent with travel, I should go 
to the verge of man-traps and shot-guns to protect 
myself. 

This house, which is now hemmed in by larger 
buildings of later date, had in the painter's time an 
incomparably " lovely and delightful situation." 
Standing near the northern boundary of the city, it 
looked out over the lagoon, — across the quiet isle 
of sepulchres, San Michele, — across the smoking 
chimneys of the Murano glass-works, and the bell- 
towers of her churches, — to the long line of the 
sea-shore on the right and to the main-land on the 
left ; and beyond the nearer lagoon islands and the 
faintly penciled outlines of Torcello and Burano in 
front, to the sublime distance of the Alps, shining 
in silver and purple, and resting their snowy heads 
against the clouds. It had a pleasant garden of 
flowers and trees, into which the painter descended 
by an open stairway, and in which he is said to have 



234 VENETIAN LIFE. 

studied the famous tree in The Death of Peter 
Martyr. Here he entertained the great and noble 
of his day, and here he feasted and made merry 
with the gentle sculptor Sansovino, and with their 
common friend, the rascal-poet Aretino. The paint- 
er's and the sculptor's wives knew each other, and 
Sansovino's Paola was often in the house of Ceciha 
Vecelho ; * and any one who is wise enough not to 
visit the place, can easily thinly of those ladies there, 
talking at an open window that gives upon the 
pleasant garden, where their husbands walk up and 
down together in the purple evening light. 

In the palace where Goldoni was born a servant 
showed me an entirely new room near the roof, in 
which he said the great dramatist had composed his 
immortal comedies. As I knew, however, that 
Goldoni had left the house w^hen a child, I could 
scarcely believe what the cicerone said, though I was 
glad he said it, and that he knew any thing at all 
of Goldoni. It is a fine old Gothic palace on a small 
canal near the Frari, and on the Calle dei Nomboli, 
just across from a shop of indigestible pastry. It is 
known by an inscription, and by the medallion of 

^ The wife of Titian's youth was, according to Ticozzi, named 
Lucia. It is in Mutinelli that I find allusion to Cecilia. The au- 
thor of the Annali Urhani, speaking of the friendship and frequent 
meetings of Titian and Sansovino, says/ — " Vivevano . . . allora 
ambedue di un amore fatto sacro dalle leggi divine, cssendo moglie 
di Tiziano una Cecilia.'' I would not advise the reader to place 
too fond a trust in any thing concerning the house of Titian. Mu- 
tinelU refers to but one house of the painter, while Ticozzi makes 
him proprietor of two. 



SOME MEMORABLE PLACES. 235 

the dramatist above the land-door ; and there is no 
harm in looking in at the court on the gromid-floor, 
where you may be pleased with the picturesque old 
stairway, wandering upward I hardly know how 
high, and adorned with many little heads of lions. 

Several palaces dispute the honor of being Bianca 
Cappello's birthplace, but MutinelH awards the dis- 
tinction to the palace at Sant' AppoUinare near 
the Ponte Storto. One day a gondolier vainglori- 
ously rowed us to the water-gate of the edifice 
through a very narrow, damp, and uncleanly canal, 
pretending that there was a beautiful staircase in its 
court. At the moment of our arrival, however, 
Bianca happened to be hanging out clothes from a 
window, and shrilly disclaimed the staircase, attribut- 
ing this merit to another Palazzo Cappello. We were 
less pleased with her appearance here, than with that 
portrait of her which we saw on another occasion in 
the palace of a lady of her name and blood. This 
lady has since been married, and the name of Cap- 
pello is now extinct. 

The Palazzo Mocenigo, in which Byron lived, is 
galvanized into ghastly newness by recent repairs, 
and as it is one of the ugliest palaces on the Grand 
Canal, it has less claim than ever upon one's interest. 
The custodian shows people the rooms where the 
poet wrote, dined, and slept, and I suppose it was 
from the hideous basket-balcony over the main door 
that one of his mistresses threw herself into the 
canal. Another of these interesting relicts is pointed 
out in the small butter-and-cheese shop which she 



236 VENETIAN LIFE. 

keeps in the street leading from Campo Sant' Angelo 
to San Paterinan : she is a fat sinner, long past 
beauty, bald, and somewhat melancholy to behold. 
Indeed, Byron's memory is not a presence which I 
approach with pleasure, and I had most enjoyment 
in his palace when I thought of good-natured little 
Thomas Moore, who once visited his lordship there. 
Byron himself hated the recollection of his life in 
Venice, and I am sure no one else need like it. 
But he is become a eosa di Venezia^ and you can- 
not pass his palace without having it pointed out to 
you by the gondoliers. Early after my arrival in 
the city I made the acquaintance of an old smooth- 
shaven, smooth-mannered Venetian, who said he had 
known Byron, and who told me that he once swam 
with him from the Port of San Nicolo to his palace- 
door. The distance is something over three miles ; 
but if the swimmers came in with the sea the feat 
was not so great as it seems, for the tide is as swift 
and strong as a mill-race. I think it would be im- 
possible to make the distance against the tide. 



CHAPTER XVL 

COMMERCE. 

To make an annual report in September upon the 
Commercial Transactions of the port, was an oflficial 
duty to which I looked forward at Venice with a 
vague feeling of injury during a year of almost un- 
interrupted tranquillity. It was not because the prep- 
aration of the report was an affair of so great labor 
that I shrank from it ; but because the material was 
wanting with which to make a respectable show 
among my consular peers in the large and hand- 
somely misprinted volume of Commercial Relations 
annually issued by the enterprising Congressional 
publishers. It grieved me that upstart ports like 
Marseilles, Liverpool, and Bremen, should occupy so 
much larger space in this important volume than my 
beloved Venice ; and it was with a feeling of profound 
mortification that I used to post my meagre account 
of a commerce that once was greater than all the 
rest of the world's together. I sometimes desper- 
ately eked out the material furnished me in the sta- 
tistics of the Venetian Chamber of Commerce by an 
agricultural essay on the disease of the grapes and its 
cure, or by a few wretched figures representative 
of a very slender mining interest in the province. 



238 VENETIAN LIFE. 

But at last I determined to end these displeasures, 
and to make such researches into the history of her 
Commerce as should furnish me forth material for a 
report worthy of the high place Venice held in my 
reverence. 

Indeed, it seemed to be by a sort of anachronism 
that I had ever mentioned contemporary Venetian 
Commerce ; and I turned with exultation from the 
phantom transactions of the present to that solid and 
magnificent prosperity of the past, of which the 
long-enduring foundations were laid in the earliest 
Christian times. For the new cities formed by the 
fugitives from barbarian invasion of the main-land, 
during the fifth century, had hardly settled around 
a common democratic government on the islands of 
the lagoons, when they began to develop maritime 
energies and resources ; and long before this govern- 
ment Avas finally established at Rialto, (the ancient 
sea-port of Padua,) or Venice had become the cap- 
ital of the young Republic, the Veneti had thriftily 
begun to turn the wild invaders of the main-land to 
account, to traffic with them, and to make treaties 
of commerce with their rulers. Theodoric, the king 
of the Goths, had fixed his capital at Ravenna, in the 
sixth century, and would have been glad to intro- 
duce Italian civilization among his people ; but this 
warlike race were not prepared to practice the use- 
ful arts, and although they inhabited one of the most 
fruitful parts of Italy, with ample borders of sea, 
they were neither sailors nor tillers of the ground. 
The Venetians supplied them (at a fine profit, no 



COMMERCE. 239 

doubt,) with the salt made in the lagoons, and with 
wines brought from Istria. The Goths viewed with 
especial amazement their skill in the management 
of their river-craft, by means of which the dauntless 
traders ascended the shallowest streams to penetrate 
the main-land, '' running on the grass of the mead- 
ows, and between the stalks of the harvest field," 
— just as in this day our own western steamers are 
known to run in a heavy dew. 

The Venetians continued to extend and confirm 
their commerce with those helpless and hungry war- 
riors, and were ready also to open a lucrative trade 
v/ith the Longobards when they descended into Italy 
about the year 570. They had, in fact, abetted the 
Longobards in their war with the Greek Emperor 
Justinian, (who had opposed their incursion,) and 
in return the barbarians gave them the right to hold 
great free marts or fairs on the shores of the la- 
goons, whither the people resorted from every part 
of the Longobard kingdom to buy the salt of the 
lagoons, grain from Istria and Dalmatia, and slaves 
from every country. 

The slave-trade, indeed, formed then one of the 
most lucrative branches of Venetian commerce, as 
now it forms the greatest stain upon the annals of 
that commerce. The islanders, however, were not 
alone guilty of this infamous trade in men ; other 
Italian states made profit of it, and it may be said 
to have been all but universal. But the Venetians 
were the most deeply involved in it, they pursued it 
the most unscrupulously, and they relinquished it the 



240 VENETIAN LIFE. 

last. The pope forbade and execrated their com- 
merce, and they sailed from the papal ports with 
cargoes of slaves for the infidels in Africa. In spite 
of the prohibitions of their own government, they 
bought Christians of kidnappers throughout Europe, 
and purchased the captives of the pirates on the seas, 
to sell them again to the Saracens. Nay, being an 
ingenious people, they turned their honest penny 
over and over again : they sold the Christians to the 
Saracens, and then for certain sums ransomed them 
and restored them to their countries ; they sold Sar- 
acens to the Christians, and plundered the infidels in 
similar transactions of ransom and restoration. It 
is not easy to fix the dates of the rise or fall of this 
slave-trade ; but slavery continued in Venice as late 
as the fifteenth century, and in earlier ages was so 
common that every prosperous person had two or 
three slaves.* The corruption of the citizens at this 
time is properly attributed in part to the existence 
of slavery among them ; and Mutinelli goes so far as 
to declare that the institution impressed permanent 
traits on the populace, rendering them idle and indis- 
posed to honest labor, by degrading labor and making 
it the office of bondmen. 

While this hateful and enormous traffic in man 
was growing up, the Venetians enriched themselves 
by many other more blameless and legitimate forms 
of commerce, and gradually gathered into their 

^ Mutinelli, Del Costume Veneziano. The present sketch of the 
history of Venetian commerce is based upon facts chiefly drawn 
from Mutinelli's delightful treatise, Del Commercio dei VenezianL 



COMMERCE. 241 

grasp that whole trade of the East with Europe 
which, passed through their hands for so many ages. 
After the dominion of the Frank's was estabhshed in 
Italy in the eighth century, they began to supply 
that people, more luxurious than the Lombards, with 
the costly stuffs, the rich jewelry, and the perfumes 
of Byzantium ; and held a great annual fair at the 
imperial city of Pavia, where they sold the Franks 
the manufactures of the polished and effeminate 
Greeks, and whence in return they carried back to 
the East the grain, wine, wool, iron, lumber, and ex- 
cellent armor of Lombardy. 

From the time when they had assisted the Longo- 
bards against the Greeks, the Venetians found it to 
their interest to cultivate the friendship of the latter^ 
until, in the twelfth century, they mastered the peo- 
ple so long caressed, and took their capital, under 
Enrico Dandolo. The privileges conceded to the 
wily and thrifty republican traders by the Greek 
Emperors, were extraordinary in their extent and 
value. Otho, the western Csesar, having succeeded 
the Franks in the dominion of Italy, had already 
absolved the Venetians from tlie annual tribute paid 
the Italian kings for the liberty of traffic, and had 
declared their commerce free throughout the Pe- 
ninsula. In the mean time they had attacked and 
beaten the pirates of Dalmatia, and the Greeks now 
recognized their rule all over Dalmatia, thus secur- 
ing to the Republic every port on the eastern shores 
of the Adriatic. Then, as they aided the Greeks to 
repel the aggressions of the Saracens and Normans, 

16 



242 VENETIAN LIFE. 

their commerce was declared free in all the ports of 
the empire, and they were allowed to trade without 
restriction in all thfe cities, and to build warehouses 
and depots throughout the dominions of the Greeks, 
wherever they chose. The harvest they reaped 
from the vast field thus opened to their enterprise, 
must have more than compensated them for their 
losses in the barbarization of the Italian contiiicnt by 
the incessant civil wars which followed the disrup- 
tion of the Lombard League, when trade and in- 
dustry languished throughout Italy. When the 
Crusaders had taken the Holy Land, the king of 
Jerusalem bestowed upon the Venetians, in return 
for important services against the infidel, the same 
privileges conceded them by the Greek Emperor ; 
and when, finally, Constantinople fell into the hands 
of the Crusaders, (whom they had skillfully diverted 
from the reconquest of Palestine to the siege of the 
Greek metropolis,) nearly all the Greek islands fell 
to the share of Venice ; and the Latin emperors, wlio 
succeeded the Greeks in dominion, gave her such 
privileges as made her complete mistress of the com- 
merce of the Levant. • 

From this opulent traffic the insatiable enterprise 
of the Republic turned, without relinquishing the 
old, to new gains in the farthest Orient. Against 
her trade the exasperated infidel had closed the 
Egyptian ports, but she did not scruple to coax the 
barbarous prince of the Scythian Tartars, newly de- 
scended upon the shores of the Black Sea; and 
having secured his friendship, she proceeded, with- 



COMMERCE. 243 

oiit imparting her design to her Latin alhes at 
Constantinople, to plant a commercial colony at the 
mouth of the Don, where the city of Azof stands. 
Through this entrepot, thenceforward, Venetian en- 
ergy, with Tartar favor, directed the entire com- 
merce of Asia with Europe, and incredibly enriched 
the Republic. The vastness and importance of such 
a trade, even at that day, when the wants of men 
were far simpler and fewer than now, could hardly 
be over-stated ; and one nation then monopolized the 
traffic which is now free to the whole world. The 
Venetians bought their wares at the great marts of 
Samarcand, and crossed the country of Tartary in 
caravans to the shores of the Caspian Sea, where they 
set sail and voyaged to the River Volga, which they 
ascended to the point of its closest proximity to the 
Don. Their goods were then transported overland 
to the Don, and were again carried by water down 
to their mercantile colony at its mouth. Their ships, 
having free access to the Black Sea, could, after re- 
ceiving their cargoes, return direct to Venice. The 
products of every country of Asia were carried into 
Europe by these dauntless traffickers, who, enlight- 
ened and animated by the travels and discoveries of 
Matteo, Nicolo, and Marco Polo, penetrated the re- 
motest regions, and brought away the treasures which 
the prevalent fears and superstitions of other nations 
would have deterred them from seeking, even if they 
had possessed the means of access to them. 

The partial civilization of the age of chivalry had 
now reached its climax, and the class which had felt 



244 VENETIAN LIFE. 

its refining effects was that best able to gratify the 
tastes still unknown to the great mass of the ignorant 
and impoverished people. It w^as a splendid time, 
and the robber counts and barons of the continent, 
newly tamed and Christianized into knights, spent 
splendidly, as became magnificent cavaliers serving 
noble ladies. The Venetians, who seldom did merely 
lieroic things, who turned the Crusades to their own 
account and made money out of the Holy Land, 
and whom one always fancies as having a half scorn 
of the noisy grandeur of chivalry, were very glad 
to supply the knights and ladies with the gorgeous 
stuffs, precious stones, and costly perfumes of the 
East ; and they now also began to establish manu- 
factories, and to practice the industrial arts at home. 
Their jewelers and workers in precious metals soon 
became famous throughout Europe ; the glass-works 
of Murano rose into celebrity and importance which 
they have never since lost (for they still supply the 
world w^ith beads) ; and they began to weave stuffs 
of gold tissue at Venice, and silks so exquisitely dyed 
that no cavalier or dame of perfect fashion was con- 
tent with any other. Besides this they gilded leather 
for lining walls, wove carpets, and wrought miracles 
of ornament in wax, — a material that modern taste 
is apt to disdain, — while Venetian candles in chande- 
liers of Venetian glass lighted up the palaces of the 
whole civilized world. 

The private enterprise of citizens was in every 
way protected and encouraged by the State, which 
did not, however, fail to make due and just profit 



COMMERCE. 245 

out of it. The ships of the merchants always sailed 
to and from Venice in fleets, at stated seasons, seven 
fleets departing annually, — one for the Greek do- 
minions, a second for Azof, a third for Trebizond, a 
fourth for Cyprus, a fifth for Armenia, a sixth for 
Spain, France, the Low Countries, and England, and 
a seventh for Africa. Each squadron of traders was 
accompanied and guarded from attacks of corsairs 
and other enemies, by a certain number of the state 
galleys, let severally to the highest bidders for the voy- 
age, at a price never less than about five hundred dol- 
lars of our money. The galleys were all manned and 
armed by the State, and the crew of each amounted 
to three hundred persons ; including a captain, four 
supercargoes, eight pilots, two carpenters, two calk- 
ers, a master of the oars, fifty cross-bowmen, three 
drummers, and two hundred rowers. The State also 
appointed a commandant of the whole squadron, w^ith 
absolute authority to hear complaints, decide contro- 
versies, and punish offences. 

While the Republic was thus careful in the protec- 
tion and discipline of its citizens in their commerce 
upon the seas, it was no less zealous for their security 
and its own dignity in their traffic with the con- 
tinent of Europe. In that rude day, neither the 
life nor the property of the merchant who visited 
the ultramontane countries was safe ; for the sorry 
device which he practiced, of taking with him a 
train of apes, buffoons, dancers, and singers, in 
order to divert his ferocious patrons from robbery 
and murder, was not always successful. The Vene- 



246 VENETIAN LIFE. 

tians, therefore, were forbidden by the State to trade 
in those parts ; and the Bohemians, Germans, and 
Hungarians, who wished to buy their wares, were 
obhged to come to the lagoons and buy them at the 
great marts which were held in different parts of the 
city, and on the neighboring main-land. A triple 
purpose was thus served, — the Venetian merchants 
were protected in their lives and goods, the national 
honor was saved from insult, and many an honest 
zecchino was turned by the innkeepers and others 
who lodged and entertained the customers of the 
merchants. ^ 

Five of these great fairs were held every week, the 
chief market being at Rialto; and the transactions in 
trade were carefully supervised by the servants of the 
State. Among the magistracies especially appointed 
for the orderly conduct of the foreign and domestic 
commerce were the so-called Mercantile Consuls ( Uf- 
jicio dei Consoli dei Mercanti)^ whose special duty it 
was to see that the traffic of the nation received no 
hurt from the schemes of any citizen or foreigner, 
and to punish offenses of this kind with banishment 
and even graver penalties. They measured every 
ship about to depart, to learn if her cargo exceeded 
the lawful amount ; they guarded creditors against 
debtors and protected poor debtors against the ra- 
pacity of creditors, and they punished thefts sus- 
tained by the merchants. It is curious to find, 
contemporary with this beneficent magistracy, a 
charge of equal dignity exercised by the College 
of Reprisals. A citizen offended in his person or 



COMMERCE. 247 

property abroad, demanded justice of the govern- 
ment of the country in which the offense was com- 
mitted. If the demand was refused, it was repeated 
by the Repubhc ; if still refused, then the Republic, 
although at peace with the nation from w^hich the 
offense came, seized any citizen of that country 
whom it could find, and, through its College of 
Reprisals, spoiled him of sufficient property to pay 
the damage done to its citizen. Finally, besides 
several other magistracies resident in Venice, the 
Republic appointed Consuls in its colonies and 
some foreign ports, to superintend the traffic of its 
citizens, and to compose their controversies. The 
Consuls w^ere paid out of duties levied on the mer- 
chandise ; they were usually nobles, and acted with 
the advice and consent of twelve other Venetian 
nobles or merchants. 

At this time, and, indeed, throughout its existence, 
the great lucrative monopoly of the Republic was the 
salt manufactured in the lagoons, and forced into 
every market, at rates that no other salt could com- 
pete with. Wherever alien enterprise attempted 
rivalry, it was instantly discouraged by Venice. 
There were troublesome salt mines, for example, in 
Croatia ; and in 1381 the Republic caused them to 
be closed by paying the King of Hungary an annual 
pension of seven thousand crowns of gold. The ex- 
act income of the State, however, from the monopoly 
of salt, or from the various imposts and duties levied 
upon merchandise, it is now difficult to know, and it 
is impossible to compute accurately the value or extent 



248 VENETIAN LIFE. 

of Venetian commerce at any one time. It reached 
the acme of its prosperity under Tommaso Mocenigo, 
who was Doo;e from 1414 to 1423. There were 
then three thousand and three hundred vessels of the 
mercantile marine, giving employment to thirty-three 
thousand seamen, and netting to their owners a profit 
of forty per cent, on the capital invested. How great 
has been the decline of this trade may be understood 
from the fact that in 1863 it amounted, according to 
the careful statistics of the Chamber of Commerce, 
to only $60,229,740, and that the number of ves- 
sels now owned in Venice is one hundred and fifty. 
As the total tonnage of these is but 26,000, it may 
be inferred that they are small craft, and in fact 
they are nearly all coasting vessels. They no longer 
bring to Venice the drugs and spices and silks of 
Samarcand, or carry her own rare manufactures to 
the ports of western Europe ; but they sail to and 
from her canals with humble freights of grain, lumber, 
and hemp. Almost as many Greek as Venetian 
ships now visit the old queen, who once levied a tax 
upon every foreign vessel in her Adriatic ; and the 
shipping from the cities of the kingdom of Italy ex- 
ceeds hers by ninety ^ail, while the tonnage of Great 
Britain is vastly greater. Her commerce has not 
only wasted to the shadow of its former magnitude, 
but it has also almost entirely lost its distinctive char- 
act^\ Glass of Murano is still exported to a value 
of about two millions of dollars annually ; but in this 
industry, as in nearly all others of the lagoons, there 
is an annual decline. The trade of the port falls off 



COMMESCE. 249 

from one to three millions of dollars yearly, and the 
manufacturing interests of the province have dwin- 
dled in the same proportion. So far as silk is con- 
cerned, there has been an immediate cause for the 
decrease in the disease which has afHicted the cocoons 
for several years past. Wine and oil are at present 
articles of import solely, — the former because of a 
malady of the grape, the latter because of negligent 
cultivation of the olive. 

A considerable number of persons are still em- 
ployed in the manufacture of objects of taste and 
ornament ; and in the Ruga Vecchia at Rialto they 
yet make the famous Venetian gold chain, which 
few visitors to the city can have failed to notice 
hanging in strands and wound upon spools, in the 
shop windows of the Old Procuratie and the Bridge 
of Rialto. It is wrought of all degrees of fineness, and 
is always so flexile that it may be folded and wound 
in any shape. It is now no longer made in great 
quantity, and is chiefly worn by contadine (as a safe 
investment of, their ready money),* and old-fashioned*^ 
people of the city, who display the finer sort in 
skeins or strands. At Chioggia, I remember to have 
seen a babe at its christening in church literally man- 
acled and shackled with Venetian chain ; and the 
little girl who came to us one day, to show us the 
splendors in which she had appeared at a dispiita 

^ Certain foreigners living in Venice were one day astonished 
to find their maid-servant in possession of a mass of this chain, 
and thought it their business to reprove her extravagance. " Sign- 
ori," she explained paradoxically, " if I keep my money, I spend 
it ; if I buy this chain, it is always money (e sempre soldi).'' 



250 VENETIAN LIFE. 

(examination of children in doctrine), was loaded 
witli it. Formerly, in the luxurious days of the 
Republic, it is said the chain was made as fine as 
sewing-silk, and worn embroidered on Genoa velvet 
by the patrician dames. It had then a cruel interest 
from the fact that its manufacture, after a time, cost 
the artisans their eyesight, so nice and subtle was 
the work. I could not help noticing that the work- 
men at the shops in the Ruga Vecchia still suffer in 
their eyes, even though the work is much coarser. 
I do not hope to describe the chain, except by saying 
that the links are horseshoe and oval shaped, and are 
connected by twos, — an oval being welded crosswise 
into a horseshoe, and so on, each two being linked 
loosely into the next. 

An infinitely more important art, in which Venice 
was distinguished a thousand years ago, has recently 
been revived there by Signor Salviati, an enthusiast 
in mosaic painting. His establishment is on the 
Grand Canal, not far from the Academy, and you 
might go by the old palace quite unsuspicious of the 
ancient art stirring with new life in its breast. " A. 
Salviati, Avvocato," is the legend of the bell-pull, 
and you do not by any means take this legal style 
for that of the restorer of a neglected art, and a 
possessor of forgotten secrets in gilded glass and 
" smalts," as they term the small delicate rods of 
vitreous substance, with which the wonders of the 
art are achieved. But inside of the palace are some 
two hundred artisans at work, — cutting the smalts 
and glass into the minute fragments of which the 



COMMERCE. 251 

mosaics are made, grinding and smoothing these 
fragments, pohshing the completed works, and re- 
producing, with incredible patience and skill, the 
lights and shadows of the pictures to be copied. 

You first enter the rooms of those whose talent 
distinguishes them as artists, and in w^hose work all 
the wonderful neatness and finish and long-suffering 
toil of the Byzantines are visible, as well as original 
life and inspiration alike impossible and profane to 
the elder mosaicists. Each artist has at hand a great 
variety of the slender stems of smalts already men- 
tioned, and breakinp; these into minute frao:ments as 
he proceeds, he inserts them in the bed of cement 
prepared to receive his picture, and thus counter- 
feits in enduring mineral the perishable w^ork of the 
painter. 

In other rooms artisans are at work upon various 
tasks of marqiieterie^ — table - tops, album - covers, 
paper-w^eights, brooches, pins and the like, — and in 
others they are sawing the smalts and glass into 
strips, and grinding the edges. Passing through yet 
another room, where the finished mosaic-works — of 
course not the pictorial mosaics — are polished by 
machinery, we enter the store-room, where the 
crowded shelves display blocks of smalts and glass 
of endless variety of color. By far the greater num- 
ber of these colors are discoveries or improvements 
of the venerable mosaicist Lorenzo Radi, who has 
found again the Byzantine secrets of counterfeiting, 
in vitreous paste, aventurine (gold stone), onyx, 
chalcedony, malachite, and other natural stones, and 



252 VENETIAN LIFE. 

who has been praised by the Academy of Fine Arts 
in Venice for producing mosaics even more durable 
in tint and workmanship than those of the Byzantine 
artists. 

In an upper story of the palace a room is set apart 
for the exhibition of the many beautiful and costly 
things which the art of the establishment produces. 
Here, besides pictures in mosaic, there are cun- 
ningly inlaid tables and cabinets, caskets, rich vases 
of chalcedony mounted in silver, and delicately 
wrought jewelry, while the floor is covered with a 
mosaic pavement ordered for the Viceroy of Egypt. 
There are here, moreover, to be seen the designs 
furnished by the Crown Princess of Prussia for the 
mosaics of the Queen's Chapel at Windsor. These, 
like all other pictures and decorations in mosaic, are 
completed in the establishment on the Grand Canal, 
and are afterward put up as wholes in the places 
intended for them. 

In Venice nothing in decay is strange. But it is 
starthng to find her in her old age nourishing into 
fresh life an art that, after feebly preserving the 
memory of painting for so many centuries, had dec- 
orated her prime only with the glories of its de- 
cline ; — for Kugler ascribes the completion of the 
mosaics of the church of St. Cyprian in Murano to 
the year 882, and the earliest mosaics of St. Mark's 
to the tenth or eleventh centuries, when the Greek 
Church had already laid her ascetic hand on Byzan- 
tine art, and fixed its conventional forms, paralyzed 
its motives, and forbidden its inspirations. 



COMMERCE. 253 

I think, however, one would look about him in vain 
for other evidences of a returning prosperity in the 
lagoons. The old prosperity of Venice, was based 
upon her monopoly of the most lucrative traffic in the 
world, as we have already seen, — upon her exclusive 
privileges in foreign countries, upon the enlightened 
zeal of her government, and upon men's imperfect 
knowledge of geography, and the barbarism of the 
rest of Europe, as well as upon the indefatigable 
industry and intelligent enterprise of her citizens. 
America was still undiscovered ; the overland route 
to India was the only one known ; the people of the 
continent outside of Italy were unthrifty serfs, ruled 
and ruined by unthrifty lords. The whole world's 
ignorance, pride, and sloth were Venetian gain ; and 
the religious superstitions of the day, which, gross as 
they were, embodied perhaps its noblest and most 
hopeful sentiment, were a source of incalculable 
profit to the sharp-witted mistress of the Adriatic. 
It was the age of penances, pilgrimages, and relic- 
hunting, and the wealth which she wrung from the 
devotion of others was exceedingly great. Her ships 
carried the pilgrims to and from the Holy Land ; 
her adventurers ransacked Palestine and the whole 
Orient for the bones and memorials of the saints ; 
and her merchants sold the precious relics through- 
out Europe at an immense advance upon first cost. 

But the foundations of this prosperity were at last 
sapped by the tide of wealth which poured into 
Venice from every quarter of the world. Her cit- 
izens brought" back the vices as well as the luxu- 



254 VENETIAN LIFE. 

ries of the debauched Orient, and the city became 
that seat of splendid idleness and proud corruption 
which it continued till the Republic fell. It is need- 
less here to rehearse the story of her magnificence 
and decay. At the time when the hardy, hungry 
people of other nations were opening paths to pros- 
perity by land and sea, the Venetians, gorged with 
the spoils of ages, relinquished their old habits of 
daring enterprise, and dropped back into luxury and 
indolence. Their incessant wars w^ith the Genoese 
began, and though they signally defeated the rival 
Republic in battle, Genoa finally excelled in com- 
merce. A Greek prince had arisen to dispute the 
sovereignty of the Latin Emperors, whom the Vene- 
tians had helped to place upon the Byzantine throne ; 
the Genoese, seeing the favorable fortunes of the 
Greek, threw the influence of their arms and in- 
trigues in his favor, and the Latins were expelled 
from Constantinople in 1271. The new Greek Em- 
peror had promised to give the sole navigation of 
the Black Sea to his allies, too;ether with the church 
and palaces possessed by the Venetians in his cap- 
ital, and he bestowed also upon the Genoese the 
city of Smyrna. It does not seem that he fulfilled 
literally all his promises, for the Venetians still con- 
tinued to sail to and from their colonv of Tana, 
at the head of the Sea of Azof, though it is cer- 
tain that they had no longer the sovereignty of 
those waters ; and the Genoese now planted on the 
shores of the Black Sea three large and important 
colonies to serve as entrepots for the trade taken 



COMMERCE, 255 

from their rivals. The oriental traffic of the latter 
was maintained through Tana, however, for nearly 
two centuries later, when, in 1410, the Mongol 
Tartars, under Tamerlane, fell upon the devoted 
colony, took, sacked, burnt, and utterly destroyed it. 
This was the first terrible blow to the most magnifi- 
cent commerce w^hich the w^orld had ever seen, and 
which had endured for ages. No wonder that, on 
the day of Tana's fall, terrible portents of woe were 
seen at Venice, — that meteors appeared, that demons 
rode the air, that the winds and waters rose and 
blew down houses and swallowed ships ! A thou- 
sand persons are said to have perished in the calami- 
ties which commemorated a stroke so mortally disas- 
trous to the national grandeur. After that the 
Venetians humbly divided with their ancient foes the 
possession and maintenance of the Genoese colony of 
Caffa, and continued, with greatly diminished glory, 
their traffic in the Black Sea ; till the Turks having 
taken Constantinople, and the Greeks having ac- 
quired under their alien masters a zeal for commerce 
unknown to them during the times of their native 
princes, the Venetians were finally, on the first pre- 
text of war, expelled from those waters in which they 
had latterly maintained themselves only by payment 
of heavy tribute to the Turks. 

In the mean time the industrial arts, in which 
Venice had heretofore excelled, began to be prac- 
ticed elsewhere, and the Florentines and the Eng- 
lish took that lead in the manufactures of the world, 
which the latter still retain. The league of the 



256 VENETIAN LIFE. 

Hanseatic cities was established and rose daily in 
importance. At London, at Bruges, at Bergen, and 
Novogorod banks were opened under the protection 
and special favor of the Hanseatic League ; its ships 
were preferred to any other, and the tide of com- 
merce setting northward, the cities of the League 
persecuted the foreigners who would have traded in 
their ports. On the west, Barcelona began to dispute 
the preeminence of Venice in the Mediterranean, 
and Spanish salt was brought to Italy itself and sold 
by the enterprising Catalonians. Their corsairs vexed 
Venetian commerce everywhere ; and in that day, 
as in our own, private English enterprise was em- 
ployed in piratical depredations on the traffic of a 
friendly power. 

The Portuguese also began to extend their com- 
merce, once so important, and catching the rage for 
discovery then prevalent, infested every sea in search 
of unknown land. One of their navigators, sailing 
by a chart which a monk named Fra Mauro, in his 
convent on the island of San Michele, had put to- 
gether from the stories of travelers, and his own 
guesses at geography, discovered the Cape of Good 
Hope, and the trade of India with Europe was turned 
in that direction, and the old over-land traffic per- 
ished. The Venetian monopoly of this traffic had 
long been gone ; had its recovery been possible, it 
would now have been useless to the declining pros- 
perity of the Republic. 

It remained for Christopher Columbus, born of 
that Genoese nation which had hated the Venetians 



COMMERCE. 257 

SO long and so bitterly, to make the discovery of 
America, and thus to give the death-blow to the su- 
premacy of Venice. While all these discoveries were 
taking place, the old queen of the seas had been 
weighed down with many and unequal wars. Her 
naval power had been everywhere crippled ; her rev- 
enues had been reduced ; her possessions, one after 
one, had been lopped away ; and at the time Colum- 
bus was on his way to America half Europe, united 
in the League of Cambray, was attempting to crush 
the Republic of Venice. 

The whole world was now changed. Commerce 
sought new chahnels ; fortune smiled on other na- 
tions. How Venice dragged onward from the end 
of her commercial greatness, and tottered wdth a 
delusive splendor to her political death, is surely one 
of the saddest of stories if not the sternest of lessons. 
17 



CHAPTER XVIL 

VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 

The national character of the Venetians was so 
largely influenced by the display and dissipation of 
the frequent festivals of the Republic, that it cannot be 
fairly estimated without taking them into considera- 
tion, nor can the disuse of these holidays (of which 
I have heretofore spoken) be appreciated in all its 
import, without particular allusion to their number 
and nature. They formed part of the aristocratic 
polity of the old commonwealth, which substituted 
popular indulgence for popular liberty, and gave the 
people costly pleasures in return for the priceless 
rights of which they had been robbed, set up national 
pride in the place of patriotism, and w^as as well sat- 
isfied with a drunken joy in its subjects as if they 
had possessed a true content. 

Full notice of these holidays would be history * 

* " Siccome/' says the editor of Giustina Renier-Mic;iiers 
Origine delle Feste Veneziane, — " Siccome Tillustre Autrice ha vo- 
luto applicare al suo lavoro il modesto titolo di Origine delle Feste 
Veneziane, e siccome questo potrebbe porgere un' idea assai 
diversa deir opera a chi non ne ha ale una cognizione, da quello 
che e sostanzialmente, si espone questo Epitome, perche ognun 
vegga almeno in parte, che quest' opera sarebbe del titolo di 
storia condegna, giacche essa non e che una costante descrizione 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 259 

of Venice, for each one had its origin in some great 
event of her existence, and they were so numerous 
as to commemorate nearly every notable incident in 
her annals. Though, as has been before observed, 
they had nearly all a general religious character, 
the Church, as usual in Venice, only seemed to 
direct the ceremonies in its own honor, while it 
really ministered to the political glory of the oli- 
garchy, wdiich knew how to manage its priests as 
well as its prince and people. Nay, it happened 
in one case, at least, that a religious anniversary 
was selected by the Republic as the day on which 
to put to shame before the populace certain of the 
highest and reverendest dignitaries of the Church. 
In 1162, Ulrich, the Patriarch of Aquileja, seized, 
by a treacherous stratagem, the city of Grado, then 
subject to Venice. The Venetians immediately be- 
sieged and took the city, with the patriarch and 
twelve of his canons in it, and carried them pris- 
oners to the lagoons.' The turbulent patriarchs of 
Aquileja had long been disturbers of the Republic's 
dominion, and the people now determined to make 
an end of these displeasures. They refused, there- 
fore, to release the patriarch, except on condition 
that he should bind himself to send them annually a 
bull and twelve fat hogs. It is not known what 

degli avvenimenti piu importanti e luminosi della Repubblica di 
Venezia." The work in question is one of much research and 
small philosophy, like most books which Venetians have written 
upon Venice ; but it has admirably served my purpose, and I am 
indebted to it for most of the information contained in this 
chapter. 



260 VENETIAN LIFE. 

meaning the patriarch attached to this singular cere- 
mony ; but with the Venetians the bull was typical 
of himself, and the swine of his canons, and they 
yearly suffered death in these animals, which were 
slaughtered during Shrovetide in the Piazza San Marco 
amid a great concourse of the people, in the pres- 
ence of the Doge and Signory. The locksmiths, and 
other workers in iron, had distinguished themselves 
in the recapture of Grado, and to their guild was 
allotted the honor of putting to death the bull and 
swine. Great art was shown in striking off the bull's 
head at one blow, without suffering the sword to 
touch the ground after passing through the animal's 
neck ; the swine were slain with lances. Athletic 
games among the people succeeded, and the Doge 
and his Senators attacked and destroyed, with staves, 
several lightly bnilt wooden castles, to symbolize the 
abasement of the feudal power before the Republic. 
As the centuries advanced this part of the ceremony, 
too:ether with the slauo;hter of the swine, was dis- 
used ; in which fact Mr. Ruskin sees evidence of 
a corrupt disdain of simple and healthy allegory on 
the part of the proud doges, but in w^hich I think 
most people will discern only a natural wdsh to dis- 
continue in more civilized times a puerile barbarity, 
Mr. Ruskin himself finds no evidence of '' state 
pride" in the abolition of the slaughter of the swine. 
The festival was very popular, and continued a long 
time, though I believe not till the fall of the Republic. 
Another tribute, equally humiliating to those who 
paid it, was imposed upon the Paduans for an insult 



YENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 261 

offered to St. Mark, and gave occasion for a national 
holiday, some fifty years after the Patriarch of Aqui- 
leja began atonement for his outrage. In the year 
1214, the citizens of Treviso made an entertain- 
ment to which they invited the noble youth of the 
surrounding cities. In the chief piazza of the town 
a castle of wood exquisitely decorated was held 
against all comers by a garrison of the fairest Tre- 
visan damsels. The weapons of defense were flowers, 
fruits, bonbons, the and bright eyes of the besieged ; 
while the missiles of attack were much the same, 
with whatever added virtue might lie in tender 
prayers and sugared supplications. Padua, Vicenza, 
Bassano, and Venice sent their gallantest youths, 
under their municipal banners, to take part in this 
famous enterprise ; and the attack was carried on by 
the leagued forces with great vigor, but with no 
effect on the Castle of Love, as it was called, till the 
Venetians made a breach at a weak point. These 
young men were better skilled in the arts of war 
than their allies ; they were richer, and had come to 
Treviso decked in the spoils of the recent sack of 
Constantinople, and at the moment they neared the 
castle it is reported that they corrupted the besieged 
by throwing handfuls of gold into the tower. Whether 
this be true or not, it is certain that the conduct of 
the Venetians in some manner roused the Paduans to 
insult, and that the hot youths came to blows. In an 
instant the standard of St. Mark was thrown down 
and trampled under the feet of the furious Paduans ; 
blood flowed, and the indignant Trevisans drove the 



262 VENETIAN LIFE. 

combatants out of their city. The spark of war 
spreading to the rival cities, the Paduans were soon 
worsted, and three hundred of their number were 
made prisoners. These they would willingly have 
ranspmed at any price, but their enemies would not 
release them except on the payment of two white 
pullets for each warrior. The shameful ransom was 
paid in the Piazza, to the inextinguishable delight 
of the Venetians, who, never wanting in sharp and 
biting wit, abandoned themselves to sarcastic exulta- 
tion. They demanded that the Paduans should, like 
the patriarch, repeat the tribute annually ; but the 
•prudent Doge Ziani judged the single humiliation 
sufficient, and refused to establish a yearly celebra- 
tion of the feast. • 

One of the most famous occasional festivals of 
Venice is described by Petrarch in a Latin letter to 
his friend Pietro Bolognese. It was in celebration 
of the reduction of the Greeks of Candia, an island 
which in 1361 had recently been ceded to the Re- 
public. The Candiotes rose in general rebellion, but 
were so promptly subdued that the news of the out- 
break scarcely anticipated the announcement of its 
suppression in Venice. Petrarch was at this time the 
guest of the Republic, and from his seat at the right 
of the Doge on the gallery of St. Mark's Church, in 
front of the bronze horses, he witnessed the chivalric 
shows given in the Piazza below, which was then un- 
paved, and admirably adapted for equestrian feats of 
arms. It is curious to read the poet's account of 
these in a city where there is now no four-footed 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 263 

beast larger than a dog. But in the age of chivahy 
even the Venetians were mounted, and rode up and 
down their narrow streets, and jousted in their great 
campos. 

Speaking of twenty - four noble and handsome 
youths, whose feats formed a chief part of a show of 
w^iich he " does not know if in the whole world 
there has been seen the equal," Petrarch says : '' It 
was a gentle sight to see so many youths decked in 
purple and gold, as they ruled w^ith the rein and 
urged with the spur their coursers, moving in glit- 
tering harness, with iron-shod feet which scarcely 
seemed to touch the ground." And it must have 
been a noble sight, indeed, to behold all this before 
the " golden fagade of the temple," in a place so 
packed with spectators " that a grain of barley could 
not have fallen to the ground. The great piazza, 
the church itself, the towers, the roofs, the arcades, 
the windows, all were — I will not say full, but run- 
ning over, walled and paved with people." At the 
right of the church was built a great platform, on 
which sat '' four hundred honestest gentlewomen, 
chosen from the flower of the nobility, and distin- 
guished in their dress and bearing, who, amid the 
continual homage offered them morning, noon, and 
night, presented the image of a celestial congress." 
Some noblemen, come hither by chance, '^ from the 
part of Britain, comrades and kinsmen of their 
king, were present," and attracted the notice of the 
poet. The feasts lasted many days, but on the third 
day Petrarch excused himself to the Doge, pleading, 



264 VENETIAN LIFE. 

he says, his " ordinary occupations, ah'eady known 
to all." 

Among remoter feasts in honor of national tri- 
umphs, was one on the Day of the Annunciation, 
commemorative of the removal of the capital of the 
Venetian isles to Rialto from Malamocco, after King 
Pepin had burnt the latter city, and when, advancing 
on Venice, he was met in the lagoons and beaten by 
the islanders and the tides : these by their recession 
stranding his boats in the mud, and those falling 
upon his helpless host with the fury of an insulted 
and imperiled people. The Doge annually assisted 
at mass in St. Mark's in honor of the victory, but 
not long afterward the celebration of it ceased, as 
did that of a precisely similar defeat of the Hunga- 
rians, who had just descended from Asia into Europe. 
In 1339 there were great rejoicings in the Piazza 
for the peace with Mastino della Scala, who, beaten 
by the Republic, ceded his city of Treviso to her. 

Doubtless the most splendid of all the occasional 
festivals was that held for the Venetian share of 
the great Christian victory at Lepanto over the 
Turks. All orders of the State took part in it ; but 
the most remarkable feature of the celebration was 
the roofing of the Merceria, all the way from St. 
Mark's to Rialto, with fine blue cloth, studded with 
golden stars to represent the firmament, as the shop- 
keepers imagined it. The pictures of the famous 
painters of that day, Titian, Tintoretto, Palma, and 
the rest, were exposed under this canopy, at the end 
near Rialto. Later, the Venetian victories over the 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 265 

Turks at the Dardanelles were celebrated by a 
regatta, in 1658 ; and Morosini's brilliant reconquest 
of the Morea, in 1688, was the occasion of other 
magnificent shows. 

The whole world has now adopted, with various 
modifications, the picturesque and exciting pastime 
of the regatta, which, according to Mutinelli,* origi- 
nated among the lagoons at a very early period, from 
a peculiar feature in the military discipline of the 
Republic. A target for practice with the bow and 
cross-bow was set up every week on the beach at 
the Lido, and nobles and plebeians rowed thither in 
barges of thirty oars, vying with each other in the 
speed and skill with which the boats were driven. 
To divert the popular discontent that followed the 
Serrar del Consiglio and the suppression of Baja- 
monte Tiepolo's conspiracy early in the fourteenth 
century, the proficiency arising from this rivalry was 
turned to account, and the spectacle of the regatta 
was instituted. Agreeably, however, to the aristo- 
cratic spirit of the newly established oligarchy, the 
patricians withdrew from the lists, and the regatta 
became the affair exclusively of the gondoliers. In 
father Italian cities, where horse and donkey races 
were the favorite amusement, the riders were of both 
sexes ; and now at Venice women also entered into 
the rivalry of the regatta. But in gallant deference 
to their weakness, they were permitted to begin the 
course at the mouth of the Grand Canal before the 
Doganna di Mare, while the men were obliged to 

* Annali Urbani di Venezia. 



266 VENETIAN LIFE. 

start from the Public Gardens. They followed the 
Grand Canal to its opposite extremity, beyond the 
present railway station, and there doubling a pole 
planted in the water near the Ponte della Croce, 
returned to the common goal before the Palazzo 
Foscari. Here was erected an ornate scaffolding 
to which the different prizes were attached. The 
first boat carried off a red banner ; the next received 
a green flag ; the third, a blue ; and the fourth, a yel- 
low one. With each of these was given a purse, 
and with the last was added, by way of gibe, a live 
pig, a picture of which was painted on the yellow 
banner. Every regatta included five courses, in 
w^hich single and double oared boats, and single 
and double oared gondolas successively competed, — 
the fifth contest being that in which the women par- 
ticipated with two-oared boats. Four prizes like 
those described were awarded to the winners in each 
course. 

The regatta was celebrated with all the pomp which 
the superb city could assume. As soon as the gov- 
ernment announced that it was to take place, the prep- 
arations of the champions began. " From that time 
the gondolier ceased to be a servant ; he became al- 
most an adoptive son ; " * his master giving him every 
possible assistance and encouragement in the daily 
exercises by which he trained himself for the contest, 
and his parish priest visiting him in his own house, to 
bless his person, his boat, and the image of the Ma- 
donna or other saint attached to the gondola. When 

■'^' Feste Veneziane. 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 267 

the great day arrived the Canalazzo swarmed with 
boats of every kind. "All the trades and callings," 
says Giustina Renier-Michiel,* with that pride in the 
Venetian past which does not always pass from ver- 
bosity to eloquence, " had each its boats appropriately 
mounted and adorned ; and private societies filled an 
hundred more. The chief families among the nobil- 
ity appeared in their boats, on w4iich they had lav- 
ished their taste and wealth." The rowers were 
dressed with the most profuse and elaborate luxury, 
and the barges were made to represent historical 
and mythological conceptions. " To this end the 
builders employed carving and sculpture, together 
with all manner of costly stuflFs of silk and velvet, 
gorgeous fringes and tassels of silver and gold, 
flowers, fruits, shrubs, mirrors, furs, and plumage 
of rare birds. . . . Young patricians, in fleet and nar- 
row craft, propelled by swift rowers, preceded the 
champions and cleared the way for them, obliging 
the spectators to withdraw on either side. . . . They 
knelt on sumptuous cushions in the prows of their 
gondolas, cross-bow in hand, and launched little pel- 
lets of plaster at the directors of such obstinate boats 
as failed to obey their orders to retire. . . . 

'' To augment the brilliancy of the regatta the 
nature of the place concurred. Let us imagine that 
superb canal, flanked on either side by a long line 
of edifices of every sort ; with great numbers of mar- 
ble palaces, — nearly all of noble and majestic struct- 
ure, some admirable for an antique and Gothic taste, 
^ Feste Veneziane. 



268 VENETIAN LIFE. 

some for the richest Greek and Roman architecture,-— 
tlieh' windows and balconies decked with damasks, 
stuffs of the Levant, tapestries, and velvets, the vivid 
colors of which were animated' still more by bor- 
ders and fringes of gold, and on which leaned beau- 
tiful women richly dressed and wearing tremulous 
and glittering jewels in their hair. Wherever the 
eye turned, it beheld a vast multitude at doorways, 
on the rivas, and even on the roofs. Some of the 
spectators occupied scaffoldings erected at favorable 
points along the sides of the canal ; and the patri- 
cian ladies did not disdain to leave their palaces, and, 
entering their gondolas, lose themselves among the 
infinite number of the boats. . . . 

" The cannons give the signal of departure. The 
boats dart over the water with the rapidity of light- 
ning. . . . They advance and fall behind alternately. 
One champion who seems to yield the way to a rival 
suddenly leaves him in the rear. The shouts of his 
friends and kinsmen hail his advantage, while others 
already passing him, force him to redouble his efforts. 
Some weaker ones succumb midway, exhausted. . . . 
They withdraw, and the kindly Venetian populace 
will not aggravate their shame with jeers ; the spec- 
tators glance at them compassionately, and turn again 
to those still in the lists. Here and there they en- 
courage them by waving handkerchiefs, and the 
women toss their shawls in the air. Each patrician 
following close upon his gondolier's boat, incites him 
with his voice, salutes him by name, and flatters his 
pride and spirit. . . . The water foams under the re- 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 269 

peated strokes of the oars ; it leaps up in spray and 
falls in showers on the backs of the rowers already 
dripping with their own sweat. ... At last behold 
the dauntless mortal who seizes the red banner ! His 
rival had almost clutched it, but one mighty stroke of 
the oar gave him the victory. . . . The air reverber- 
ates with a clapping of hands so loud that at the re- 
motest point on the canal the moment of triumph is 
known. The victors plant on their agile boat the 
conquered flag, and instead of thinking to rest their 
weary arms, take up the oars again and retrace their 
course to receive congratulations and applause." 

The regattas were by no means of frequent occur- 
rence, for only forty-one took place during some five 
centuries. The first was given in 1315, and the 
last in 1857, in honor of the luckless Archduke Max- 
imilian's marriage with Princess Charlotte of Bel- 
gium. The most sumptuous and magnificent regatta 
of all was that given to the city in the year 1686, by 
Duke Ernest of Brunswick. This excellent prince 
having sold a great part of his subjects to the Ee- 
public for use in its wars against the Turk, gener- 
ously spent their price in the costly and edifying 
entertainments of which Venice had already become 
the scene. The Judgment of Paris, and the Triumph 
of the Marine Goddesses had been represented at his 
expense on the Grand Canal, with great acceptance, 
and now the Triumph of Neptune formed a principal 
feature in the gayeties of his regatta. Nearly the 
whole of the salt-water mythology was employed in 
the ceremony. An immense wooden whale support- 



270 VENETIAN LIFE. 

ing a structure of dolphins and Tritons, surmounted 
by a statue of Neptune, and drawn by sea-horses, 
moved from the Piazzetta to the Palazzo Foscari, 
where numbers of Sirens sported about in every 
direction till the regatta began. The whole com- 
pany of the deities, very splendidly arrayed, then 
joined them as spectators, and behaved in the man- 
ner affected by gods and goddesses on these occasions. 
Mutinelli ^ recounts the story with many sighs and 
sneers and great exactness ; but it is not interesting. 
The miraculous recovery of the body of St. Mark, 
in 1094, after it had been lost for nearly two cen- 
turies, created a festive anniversary which was cele- 
brated for a while wdth great religious pomp ; but 
the rejoicings w^ere not separately continued in after 
years. The festival was consolidated (if one may so 
speak) with two others in honor of the same saint, 
and the triple occasions were commemorated by a 
single holiday. The holidays annually distinguished 
by civil or ecclesiastical displays were tw^enty-five in 
number, of w^hich only eleven were of religious ori- 
gin, though all were of partly rehgious observance. 
One of the most curious and interesting of the for- 
mer was of the earliest date, and w^as continued till 
the last years of the Republic. In 696 Narses, the 
general of the Greek Emperor, w^as furnished by the 
Venetians with means of transport by sea from Aqui- 
leja to Ravenna for the army w^hich he was leading 
against the Ostrogoths ; and he made a vow that if 
successful in his campaign, he would requite their 

^ Annali Urhani. 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 271 

generosity by erecting two churches in Venice. Ac- 
cordingly, when he had beaten the Ostrogoths, he 
caused two votive churches to be built, — one to St. 
Theodore, on the site of the present St. Mark's. 
Church, and another to San Geminiano, on the op- 
posite bank of the canal which then flowed there. 
In lapse of time the citizens, desiring to enlarge 
their Piazza, removed the church of San Geminiano 
back as far as the present Fabbrica Nuova, which 
Napoleon built on the site of the demolished temple, 
between the western ends of the New and Old Pro- 
curatie. The removal was effected without the 
pope^s leave, which had been asked, but was refused 
in these words, — " The Holy Father cannot sanction 
the commission of a sacrilege, though he can par- 
don it afterwards." The pontiff, therefore, imposed 
on the Venetians for penance that the Doge should 
pay an annual visit forever to the church. On the 
occasion of this visit the parish priest met him at the 
door, and offered the holy water to him ; and then 
the Doge, having assisted at mass, marched with his 
Signory and the clergy of the church to its original 
site, where the clergy demanded that it should be 
rebuilt, and the Doge replied with the promise, — 
" Next year." A red stone was set in the pavement 
to mark the spot w^here the Doge renewed this 
never-fulfilled promise.* The old church was de- 

^" As the author of the Feste Veneziane tells this story it is less 
dramatic and characteristic. The clergy, she says, reminded the 
Doge of the occasion of his visit, and his obligation to renew it the 
following year, whidi he promised to do. I cling to the version in 
the text, for it seems to me that the Doge's perpetual promise to 



272 VENETIAN LIFE. 

stroyed by fire, and Sansovino built, in 1506, the 
temple thrown down by Napoleon to make room for 
his palace. 

The 31st of January, on which day in 828 the 
body of St. Mark was brought from Alexandria to 
Venice, is still observed, though the festival has lost 
all the splendor which it received from civil interven- 
tion. For a thousand years the day was hallowed by 
a solemn mass in St. Mark's, at which the Doge and 
his Signory assisted. 

The chief of the State annually paid a number of 
festive visits, which were made the occasion of as 
many holidays. To the convent of San Zaccaria he 
went in commemoration of the visit paid to that re- 
treat by Pope Benedict III., in 855, when the pon- 
tiff was so charmed by the piety and goodness of the 
fair nuns, that, after his return to Rome, he sent 
them great store of relics and indulgences. It thus 
became one of the most popular of the holidays, and 
the people repaired in great multitude with their 
Doge to the convent, on each recurrence of the day, 
that they might see the relics and buy the indul- 
gences. The nuns w^ere of the richest and no- 
blest families of the city, and on the Doge's first 
visit, they presented him with that bonnet which 
became the symbol of his sovereignty. It was 
wrought of pure gold, and set with precious stones 
of marvelous great beauty and value ; and in order 

rebuild the church was a return in kind for the pope's astute an- 
swer to the petition asking him to allow its removal. So good a 
thing ought to be history. 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 273 

that the State might never seem forgetful of the mu- 
nificence which bestowed the gift, the bonnet was 
annually taken from the treasury and shown by the 
Doge himself to the Sisters of San Zaccaria. The 
Doge Pietro Tradonico, to whom the bonnet was 
given, was killed in a popular tumult on this holi- 
day, while going to the convent. 

There was likewise a vast concourse of people and 
traffic in indulgences at the church of Santa Maria 
della Carita (now the Academy of Fine Arts), on 
the anniversary of the day when Pope Alexander 
III., in 1177, flying from the Emperor Barbarossa, 
found refuge in that monastery.* He bestowed 
great privileges upon it, and the Venetians honored 
the event to the end of their national existence. 

One of the rare occasions during the year when the 
Doge appeared officially in public after nightfall, was 
on St. Stephen's Day. He then repaired at dusk in 
his gilded barge, with splendid attendance of no- 
bles and citizens, to the island church of San Gior- 
gio Maggiore, wdiither, in 1009, the body of St. 
Stephen was brought from Constantinople. On the 
first of May the Doge visited the Convent of the 
Virgins, (the convent building now forms part of the 
Arsenal,) where the abbess presented him with a 
bouquet, and graceful and pleasing ceremonies took 
place in commemoration of the erection and endow- 

* Selvatico and Lazari in their admirable Guida Artistica e 
Storica di Veneza, say that the pope merely lodged in the mon- 
astery on the day when he signed the treaty of peace with Bar- 
barossa. 

18 



274 VENETIAN LIFE. 

nient of the church. The head of the State also 
annually assisted at mass in St. Mark's, to celebrate 
the arrival in Venice of St. Isidore's body, which the 
Doo;e Domenico Michiel brouo;ht with him from the 
East, at the end of twenty-six years' war against the 
infidels; and, finally, after the year 1485, when the 
Venetians stole the bones of San Rocco from the 
Milanese, and deposited them in the newly finished 
Scuola di San Rocco, a ducal visit was annually paid 
to that edifice. 

Two only of the national religious festivals yet 
survive the Republic, — that of the church of the 
Redentore on the Giudecca, and that of the church 
of the Salute on the Grand Canal, — both votive 
churches, built in commemoration of the city's deliv- 
erances from the pest in 1578 and 1630. In their 
general features the celebrations of the two holidays 
are much alike ; but that of the Salute is the less 
important of the two, and is more entirely religious 
in its character. A bridge of boats is annually 
thrown across the Canalazzo, and on the day of the 
Purification, the people throng to the Virgin's shrine 
to express their gratitude for her favor. This grati- 
tude was so strong immediately after the cessation 
of the pest in 1630, that the Senate, while the archi- 
tects were preparing their designs for the present 
church, caused a w^ooden one to be built on its site, 
and consecrated with ceremonies of singular splendor. 
On the Festa del Redentore (the third Sunday of 
July) a bridge of boats crosses the great canal of 
the Giudecca, and vast throngs constantly pass it, day 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 275 

and night. But though the small tradesmen who 
deal in fried cakes, and in apples, peaches, pears, 
and other fruits, make intolerable uproar behind their 
booths on the long quay before the church ; though 
the venders of mulberries (for which the gardens 
of the Giudecca are famous) fill the air with their 
sweet jargoning (for their cries are like the shrill 
notes of so many singing-birds) ; though thousands 
of people pace up and down, and come and go upon 
the bridge, yet the Festa del Redentore has now 
none of the old-time gayety it wore when the Vene- 
tians thronged the gardens, and feasted, sang, danced, 
and flirted the night away, and at dawn went in 
their fleets of many-lanterned boats, covering the 
lagoon with fairy light, to behold the sunrise on the 
Adriatic Sea. 

Besides the religious festivals mentioned, there 
were five banquets annually given by the State on 
the several days of St. Mark, St. Vitus, St. Jerome, 
and St. Stephen, and the Day of the Ascension, all 
of which were attended with religious observances. 
Good Friday was especially hallowed by church pro- 
cessions in each of the campos ; and St. Martha's 
Day was occasion for junketings on the Giudecca 
Canal, when a favorite fish, being in season, was de- 
votion ally eaten. 

The civil and political holidays which lasted till the 
fall of the Republic were eleven. One of the ear- 
liest w^as the anniversary of the recapture of the Ve- 
netian Brides, wdio were snatched from their bride- 
grooms, at the altar of San Pietro di Castello, bv 



276 VENETIAN LIFE. 

Triestine pirates. The class of citizens most distin- 
guished in the punishment of the abductors was the 
trade of carpenters, who lived chiefly in the parish 
of Santa Maria Formosa ; and when the Doge in his 
gratitude bade them demand any reasonable grace, 
the trade asked that he should pay their quarter an 
annual visit. "But if it rains?" said the Doge. 
" We wull give you a hat to cover you," answered 
the carpenters. "• And if I am hungry ? " " We 
will give you to eat and drink." So when the Doge 
made his visit on the day of the^ Virgin's Purification, 
he was given a hat of gilded straw, a bottle of wine, 
and loaves of bread. On this occasion the State be- 
stowed dowers upon twelve young girls among the 
fairest and best of Venice (chosen two from each of 
the six sections of the city), who marched in pro- 
cession to the church of Santa Maria Formosa. But 
as time passed, the custom lost its simplicity and pu- 
rity : pretty girls were said to make eyes at handsome 
youths in the crowd, and scandals occurred in public. 
Twelve wooden figures were then substituted, but 
the procession in which they were carried was fol- 
lowed by a disgusted and hooting populace, and as- 
sailed with a shower of turnips. The festivities, 
which used to last eight days, with incredible mag- 
nificence, fell into discredit, and were finally abol- 
ished during the war when the Genoese took 
Chioggia and threatened Venice, under Doria. 
This was the famous Festa delle Marie. 

In 997 the Venetians beat the Narentines at sea, 
and annexed all Istria, as far as Dalmatia, to the Re- 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 277 

public. On the day of the Ascension, of the same 
year, the Doge, for the first time, celebrated the do- 
minion of Venice over the Adriatic, though it was 
not till some two hundred years later that the Pope 
Alexander III. blessed the famous espousals, and 
confirmed the Republic in the possession of the sea 
forever. '' What," cries Giustina Renier - Michiel, 
turning to speak of the holiday thus established, and 
destined to be the proudest in the Venetian calen- 
dar, — " what shall I say of the greatest of all our 
solemnities, that of the Ascension ? Alas ! I myself 
saw Frenchmen and Venetians, full of derision and 
insult, combine to dismantle the Bucintoro and burn 
it for the gold upon it ! " * . . . (This was the nup- 
tial-ship in which the Doge went to wed the sea, 
and the patriotic lady tells us concerning the Bucin- 
toro of her day) : ^' It was in the form of a galley, 
and two hundred feet long, with two decks. The first 
of these was occupied by an hundred and sixty row- 
ers, the handsomest and strongest of the fleet, who sat 
four men to each oar, and there awaited their orders ; 

^ That which follows is a translation of the report given by 
Cesare Cantu, in his Grande Illustrazione del Lombardo-Veneto, 
of a conversation with the author of Feste Veneziane. It is 
not necessary to remind readers of Venetian history that Eenier 
and Michiel were of the foremost names in the Golden Book. 
She who bore them both was born before the fall of the RepnbUc 
which she so much, loved and lamented, and no doubt felt more 
than the grief she expresses for the fate of the last Bucintoro. 
It was destroyed, as she describes^ in 1796, by the French Eepub- 
licans and Venetian Democrats after the abdication of the oli- 
garchy ; but a fragment of its mast yet remains, and is to be seen 
in the museum of the Arsenal. 



278 VENETIAN LIFE. 

forty other sailors completed the crew. The upper deck 
was divided lengthwise by a partition, pierced with 
arched doorways, ornamented with gilded figures, 
and covered with a roof supported by caryatides — 
the Avhole surmounted by a canopy of crimson vel- 
vet embroidered with gold. Under this were ninety 
seats, and at the stern a still richer chamber for the 
Doge's throne, over which drooped the banner of St. 
Mark. The prow was double-beaked, and the sides 
of the vessel were enriched with figures of Justice, 
Peace, Sea, Land, and other allegories and orna- 
ments. 

" Let me imagine those times — it is the habit of 
the old. At midday, having heard mass in the 
chapel of the Collegio, the Doge descends the Giant's 
Stairs, issues from the Porta della Carta,* and passes 
the booths of the mercers and glass-venders erected 
for the fair beginning that evening. He is preceded 
by eight standard-bearers with the flags of the Re- 
public, — red, blue, white, and purple, — given by 
Alexander HI. to the Doge Ziani. Six trumpets of 
silver, borne by as many boys, mix their notes with 
the clangor of the bells of the city. Behind come the 
retinues of the ambassadors in sumptuous liveries, 
and the fifty Comandadori in their flowing blue robes 
and red caps ; then follow musicians, and the squires 
of the Doge in black velvet ; then the guards of the 
Doge, two cliancellors, the secretary of the Pregadi, 
a deacon clad in purple and bearing a wax taper, six 

• ^ The gate of the Ducal Palace wliich opens upon the Piazzetta, 
next St. Mark's. 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 279 

canons, three parish priests in their sacerdotal robes, 
and the Doge's chaplain dressed in crimson. The 
grand chancellor is known by his crimson vesture. 
Two squires bear the Doge's chair and the cushion 
of cloth of gold. And the Doge — the representa- 
tive, and not the master of his country ; the exec- 
utor, and not the maker of the laws ; citizen and 
prince, revered and guarded, sovereign of individuals, 
servant of the State — comes clad in a long mantle of 
ermine, cassock of blue, and vest and hose of tocca 
d'oro^^ with the golden bonnet on his head, under the 
umbrella borne by a squire, and surrounded by the 
foreign ambassadors and the papal nuncio, while his 
drawn sword is carried by a patrician recently des- 
tined for some government of land or sea, and soon 
to depart upon his mission. In the rear comes a 
throng of personages, — the grand captain of the city, 
the judges, the three chiefs of the Forty, the Avo- 
godori, the three chiefs of the Council of Ten, the 
three censors, and the sixty of the Senate with the 
sixty of the Aggiunta, all in robes of crimson silk. 

" On the Bucintoro, each takes the post assigned 
him, and the prince ascends the throne. The Admi- 
ral of the Arsenal and the Lido stands in front as 
pilot ; at the helm is the Admiral of Malamacco, and 
around him the ship-carpenters of the Arsenal. The 
Bucintoro, amid redoubled clamor of bells and roar 
of cannon, quits the riva and majestically plows the 
lagoon, surrounded by innumerable boats of every 
form and size. 

* A gauze of gold and silk. 



280 VENETIAN LIFE. 

" The Patriarch, who had already sent several 
vases of flowers to do courtesy to the company in the 
Bucmtoro, joins them at the island of Sant' Elena, 
and sprinkles their course with holy water. So they 
reach the port of Lido, whence they formerly issued 
out upon the open sea ; but in my time they paused 
there, turning the stern of the vessel to the sea. 
Then the Doge, amid the thunders of the artillery 
of the fort, took the ring blessed by the Patriarch, — 
who now emptied a cup of holy water into the sea, — 
and, advancing into a little gallery behind his throne, 
threw the ring into the waves, pronouncing the 
words, Desponsamus te^ mare^ in signum veri per- 
petitique dominii. Proceeding then to the church of 
San Nicoletto, they listened to a solemn mass, and 
returned to Venice, where the dignitaries were en- 
tertained at a banquet, while the multitude peace- 
fully dispersed among the labyrinths of the booths 
erected for the fair." * 

=^ One of the sops thrown to the populace on this occasion, as 
we learn from Mutinelli, was the admission to the train of gilded 
barges following the Bucintoro of a boat bearing the chief of the 
Nicolotti, one of the factions into which from time immemorial the 
lower classes of Venice had been divided. The distinction be- 
tween the two parties seems to have been purely geographical ; 
for there is no apparent reason why a man should have belonged 
to the Castellani except that he lived in the eastern quarter of the 
city, or to the Nicolotti, except that he lived in the western quar- 
ter. The government encouraged a rivalry not dangerous to 
itself, and for a long time the champions of the two sections met 
annually and beat each other with rods. The form of contest was 
afterwards modified, and became a struggle for the possession of 
certain bridges, in which the defeated were merely thrown into the 
canals. I often passed the scene of the fiercest of these curious 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 281 

This fair, whicli was establislied as early as 1180, 
was an industrial exhibition of the arts and trades 
peculiar to Venice, and was repeated annually, w^ith 
increasing ostentation, till the end, in 1796. Indeed, 
the feasts of the Republic at last grew so numerous 
that it became necessary, as we have seen before, to 
make a single holiday pay a double or triple debt of 
rejoicing. When the Venetians recovered Chioggia 
after the terrible war of 1380, the Senate refused to 
yield them another /^Si^<^, and merely ordered that SL 
Mark's Day should be thereafter observed with some 
added ceremony : there was already one festival com- 
memorative of a triumph over the Genoese (that of 
San Giovanni Decollato, on whose day, in 1358, the 
Venetians beat the Genoese at Negroponte), and the 
Senate declared that this was sufficient. A curious 
custom, however, on the Sunday after Ascension, 
celebrated a remoter victory over the same enemies, 
to which it is hard to attach any historic probability. 
It is not known exactly when the Genoese in im- 
mense force penetrated to Poveglia (one of the small 
islands of the lagoons), nor why being there they 
stopped to ask the islanders the best way of getting 
to Venice. But tradition says that the sly Povegliesi 
persuaded these silly Genoese that the best method 
of navigating the lagoons was by means of rafts, which 
they constructed for them, and on which they sent 

battles at San Barnaba, where the Ponte de Piigni is adorned 
with four feet of stone let into the pavement, and defying each 
other from the four corners of the bridge. Finally, even these 
contests were given up, and the Castellani and Nicololti spent their 
rivalry in marvelous acrobatic feats. 



282 VENETIAN LIFE. 

them afloat. About the time the Venetians came 
out to meet the armada, the withes binding the 
members of the rafts gave way, and the Genoese 
who were not drowned in the tides stuck in the 
mud, and were cut in pieces hke so many melons. 
No one will be surprised to learn that not a soul of 
them escaped, and that only the Povegliesi lived 
to tell the tale. Special and considerable priv- 
ileges were conferred on them for their part in 
this exploit, and were annually confirmed by the 
Doge, when a deputation of the islanders called on 
him in his palace, and hugged and kissed the devoted 
prince. 

People w^ho ivill sentimentalize over the pigeons of 
St. Mark's, may like to know that they have been 
settled in the city ever since 877. After the relig- 
ious services on Palm Sunday, it was anciently the 
custom of the sacristans of St. Mark's to release 
doves fettered with fragments of paper, and thus 
partly disabled from flight, for the people to scramble 
for in the Piazza. The people fatted such of the 
birds as they caught, and ate them at Easter, but 
those pigeons which escaped took refuge in the roof 
of the church, where they gradually assumed a cer- 
tain sacredness of character, and increased to enor- 
mous numbers. They were fed by provision of the 
Republic, and being neglected at the time of its fall, 
many of them were starved. But they now flourish 
on a bequest left by a pious lady for their mainte- 
nance, and on the largess of grain and polenta con- 
stantly bestowed by strangers. 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 283 

Besides the holidays mentioned, the 6th of De- 
cember was rehgiously observed in honor of the 
taking of Constantmople, the Doge assisting at mass 
in the ducal chapel of St. Nicholas. He also annu- 
ally visited, with his Signory in the state barges, and 
with great concourse of people, the church of San 
Vito on the 15th of June, in memory of the change 
of the government from a democracy to an oligarchy, 
and of the suppression of Bajamonte Tiepolo's con- 
spiracy. On St. Isidore's Day he went with his 
Signory, and the religious confraternities, in torch- 
light procession, to hear mass at St. Mark's in celebra- 
tion of the failure of Marin FaHer's plot. On the 17th 
of January he visited by water the hospital erected 
for invalid soldiers and sailors, and thus commem- 
orated the famous defence of Scutari against the 
Turks, in 1413. For the peace of 1516, concluded 
after the dissolution of the League of Cambray, he 
went in his barge to the church of Santa Marina, who 
had potently exerted her influence for the preser- 
vation of the Republic against allied France, Aus- 
tria, Spain, and Rome. On St. Jerome's Day, when 
the newly-elected members of the Council of Ten 
took their seats, the Doge entertained them with a 
banquet, and there were great popular rejoicings over 
an affair in which the people had no interest. 

It is by a singular caprice of fortune that, while 
not only all the Venetian holidays in anywise con- 
nected w^ith the glory of the Republic, but also those 
which peculiarly signalized her piety and gratitude, 
pave ceased to be, a festival common to the whole 



284 VENETIAN LIFE. 

Catholic world should still be observed in Venice 
with extraordinary display. On the day of Corpus 
Christ! there is a superb ecclesiastical procession in 
the Piazza. 

The great splendor of the solemnization is said to 
date from the times when Enrico Dandolo and his 
fclIow-Crusaders so far forgot their purpose of taking 
Palestine from the infidels as to take Constantmople 
from the schismatics. Up to that period the day of 
Corpus Christi was honored by a procession from what 
was then the Cathedral of San Pietro di Castello ; 
but now all the thirty parishes of the city, with their 
hundred churches, have part in the procession, which 
is of such great length as to take some two hours in 
its progress round the Piazza. 

Several days before the holiday workmen begin to 
build, within the Place of St. Mark, the colonnade 
through which the procession is to pass ; they roof it 
with blue cotton cloth, and adorn it with rolls of 
pasteboard representing garlands of palm. At last, 
on the festive morning, the dwellers on the Grand 
• Canal are drawn to their balconies by the apparition 
of boat-loads of facchini, gorgeous in scarlet robes, 
and bearing banners, painted candles, and other mov- 
able elements of devotion, with which they pass to 
the Piazzetta, and thence into St. Mark's. They 
re-appear presently, and, with a guard of Austrian 
troops to clear the way before them, begin their 
march under the canopy of the colonnade. 

When you have seen the Place of St. Mark by 
night your eye has tasted its most delicate delight. 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 285 

But then it is the delight given by a memory only, 
and it touches you with sadness. You must see 
the Piazza to-day, — every window fluttering with 
rich stuffs and vivid colors ; the three great flag- 
staffs * hanging their heavy flags ; the brilhant square 
alive with a holiday population, with resplendent uni- 
forms, with Italian gesture and movement, and that 
long glittering procession, bearing slowly on the au- 
gust paraphernalia of the Church — you must see all 
this before you can enter into the old heart of Ve- 
netian magnificence, and feel its life about you. 

To-day, the ancient church of San Pietro di Cas- 
tello comes first in the procession, and, with a proud 
humility, the Basilica San Marco last. Before each 
parochial division goes a banner displaying the pict- 
ure or distinctive device of its titular saint, under the 
shadow of which chants a priest ; there are the hosts 
of the different churches, and the gorgeous canopies 
under which they are elevated ; then come facchini 
dressed in scarlet and bearing the painted candles, or 
the long carved and gilded candlesticks ; and again 
facchini delicately robed in vestments of the purest 
white linen, with caps of azure, green, and purple, 
and shod with sandals or white shoes, carrying other 
apparatus of worship. Each banner and candlestick 
has a fluttering leaf of tinsel paper attached to it, and 
the procession makes a soft rustling as it passes. The 
matter-of-fact character of the external Church walks 
between those symbolists, the candle-bearers, — in the 
form of persons who gather the dropping fatness of 
^ Once bearing the standards of Cyprus, Candia, and Venice. 



286 VENETIAN LIFE. 

the candles, and deposit it in a vase carried for that 
purpose. Citizens march in the procession with can- 
dles ; and there are charity-schools which also take 
part, and sing in the harsh, shrill manner, of which I 
think only little boys who have their heads closely 
shorn are capable. 

On all this we looked down from a window of the 
Old Procuratie — of course with that calm sense of 
superiority which people are apt to have in regarding 
the solemnities of a religion different from their own. 
But that did not altogether prevent us from enjoying 
what was really beautiful and charming in the scene. 
I thought most of the priests, very good and gentle 
looking, — and in all respects they were much pleas- 
anter to the eye than the monks of the Carmelite 
order, who, in shaving their heads to simulate the 
Saviour's crown of thorns, produce a hideous bur- 
lesque of the divine humiliation. Yet many even of 
these had earnest and sincere faces, and I could not 
think so much as I ought, perhaps, of their idle life, 
and the fleas in their coarse brown cloaks. I confess, 
indeed, I felt rather a sadness than an indignation at 
all that self-sacrifice to an end of which I could but 
dimly sefe the usefulness. With some things in this 
grand spectacle we were wholly charmed, and doubt- 
less had most delight in the little child who per- 
sonated John the Baptist, and who was quite naked, 
but for a fleece folded about him : he bore the cross- 
headed staff* in one small hand, and led with the 
other a lamb much tied up with blue ribbon. Here 
and there in the procession little girls, exquisitely 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 287 

dressed, and gifted by fond mothers with wings and 
aureoles, walked, scattering flowers. I likewise 
greatly relished the lively holiday air of a company 
of airy old men, the pensioners of some charity, who, 
in their white linen trousers and blue coats, formed 
a prominent feature of the display. Far from be- 
ing puffed up with their consequence, they gossiped 
cheerfully with the spectators in the pauses of the 
march, and made jests to each other in that light- 
hearted, careless way observable in old men taken 
care of, and with nothing before them to do worth 
speaking of but to die. I must own that the honest 
facchini who bore the candles were equally affable, 
and even freer with their jokes. But in this they 
formed a fine contrast to here and there a closely 
hooded devotee, who, with hidden face and silent 
lips, was carrj^ing a taper for religion, and not, like 
them, for money. I liked the great good-natured 
crowd, so orderly and amiable ; and I enjoyed even 
that old citizen in the procession who, when the Pa- 
triarch gave his blessing, found it inconvenient to 
kneel, and compromised by stretching one leg a great 
way out behind him. These things, indeed, quite 
took my mind off* of the splendors ; and I let the 
canopy of the Scuola di San Rocco (worth 40,000 
ducats) go by with scarce a glance, and did not be- 
stow much more attention upon the brilliant liveries 
of the Patriarch's servants, — though the appearance 
of these ecclesiastical flunkies is far more impressive 
than that of any of their secular brethren. They 
went gorgeously before the Patriarch, who was sur- 



288 VENETIAN LIFE. 

rounded by the richly dressed clergy of St. Mark's, 
and by clouds of incense rising from the smoking 
censers. He walked under the canopy in his car- 
dinal's robes, and with his eye fixed upon the Host. 

All at once the procession halted, and the Patri- 
arch blessed the crowd, which knelt in a profound 
silence. Then the military band before him struck 
up an air from " Un Ballo in Maschera ; " the pro- 
cession moved on to the cathedral, and the crowd 
melted away. 

The once-magnificent day of the Ascension the 
Venetians now honor by closing all shop-doors be- 
hind them and putting all thought of labor out of 
their minds, and going forth to enjoy themselves in 
the mild, inexplosive fashion which seems to satisfy 
Italian nature. It is the same on all the feast- 
days : then the city sinks into profounder quiet ; only 
bells are noisy, and where their clangor is so com- 
mon as in Venice, it seems at last to make friends 
with the general stillness, and disturbs none but peo- 
ple of untranquil minds. We always go to the Pi- 
azza San Marco when we seek pleasure, and now, for 
eight days only of all the year, we have there the 
great spectacle of the Adoration of the Magi, per- 
formed every hour by automata within the little 
golden-railed gallery on the facade of the Giant's 
Clock Tov/er. There the Virmn sits above the 
azure circle of the zodiac, all heavily gilded, and 
holding the Child, equally splendid. Through the 
doors on either side, usually occupied by the illumi- 
nated figures of the hours, appears the procession. 



VENETIAN 'holidays. 289 

and disappears. The stately giant on the summit 
of the tower, at the hither side of the great bell, sol- 
emnly strikes the hour — as a giant should who has 
struck it for centuries — with a grand, whole-arm 
movement, and a slow, muscular pride. We look 
up — we tourists of the red-backed books ; we peas- 
ant-girls radiant with converging darts of silver pier- 
cing the masses of our thick black hair ; we Aus- 
trian soldiers in white coats and blue tights; we 
voiceful sellers of the cherries of Padua, and we 
calm loafers about the many-pillared base of the 
church — Ave look up and see the Adoration. First, 
the trumpeter, blowing the world news of the act ; 
then the first king, turning softly to the Virgin, and 
bowing ; then the second, that enthusiastic devotee, — 
the second who lifts his crown quite from his head ; 
last the Ethiopian prince, gorgeous in green and 
gold, who, I am sorry to say, burlesques the whole 
solemnity. His devotion may be equally heart-felt, 
but it is more jerky than that of the others. He 
bows well and adequately, but recovers his balance 
with a prodigious start, altogether too suggestive of 
springs and wheels. Perhaps there is a touch of the 
pathetic in this grotesque fatality of the black king, 
whose suffering race has always held mankind be- 
tween laughter and tears, and has seldom done a fine 
thing without leaving somewhere the neutralizing 
absurdity ; but if there is, the sentimental may find 
it, not I. When the procession has disappeared, we 
wait till the other giant has struck the hour, and 
then we disperse. 

19 



290 VENETIAN LIFE. 

If it is six o'clock, and the sea lias beo-un to 
breathe cool across the Basin of St. Mark, we find 
our account in strolling upon the long Riva degli 
Schiavoni towards the Public Gardens. One would 
suppose, at first thought, that here, on this magnifi- 
cent quay, with its glorious lookout over the lagoons, 
the patricians would have built their finest palaces ; 
whereas there is hardly any thing but architectural 
shabbiness from the Ponte della Paglia at one end, 
to the Ponte Santa Marina at the other. But there 
need be nothing surprising in the fact, after all. The 
feudal wealth and nobility of other cities kept the 
base at a respectful distance by means of lofty stone 
walls, and so shut in their palaces and gardens. 
Here equal seclusion could only be achieved by 
building flush npon the w^ater, and therefore all the 
finest palaces rise sheer from the canals ; and caffe, 
shops, barracks, and puppet-shows occupy the Riva 
degli Schiavoni. Nevertheless, it is the favorite 
promenade of the Venetians for the winter sunshine, 
and at such times in the summer as when the sun's 
rage is tempered. There is always variety in the 
throng on the Riva, but the fashionable part of it is 
the least interestino; : here and there a mao;nificent 
Greek flashes through the crowd, in dazzling white 
petticoats and gold-embroidered leggings and jacket ; 
now and then a tall Dalmat or a solemn Turk ; even 
the fishermen and the peasants, and the lower orders 
of the people, are picturesque ; but polite Venice is 
hopelessly given to the pride of the eyes, and com- 
mits all the excesses of the French modes. The 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 291 

Venetian dandy, when dressed to his own satisfac- 
tion, is the worst-dressed man in the world. His 
hat curls outrageously in brim and sides ; his coat- 
sleeves are extremely full, and the garment pinches 
him at the waist ; his pantaloons flow forth from the 
hips, and contract narrowly at the boot, which is 
square-toed and made too long. The whole effect is 
somethino; not to be seen elsewhere, and is well cal- 
culated to move the beholder to desperation.^ The 
Venetian fine lady, also, is prone to be superfine. 
Her dress is as full of color as a Paolo Veronese ; 
in these narrow streets, where it is hard to expand 
an umbrella, she exaggerates hoops to the utmost ; 
and she fatally hides her ankles in pantalets. 

In the wide thorouo;hfare leadino; from the last 
bridge of the Riva to the gate of the gardens there 
is always a clapping of wooden shoes on the stones, a 
braying of hand-organs, a shrieking of people who 
sell fish and fruit, at once insufferable and indescrib- 
able. The street is a rio terrd^ — a fiUed-up canal, — 
and, as always happens with rii terrain is abandoned 
to the poorest classes who manifest themselves, as the 
poorest classes are apt to do always, in groups of 
frowzy women, small girls carrying large babies, 
beggars, of course, and soldiers. I spoke of fruit- 
sellers ; but in this quarter the traffic in pumpkin- 
seeds is the most popular, — the people finding these 
an inexpensive and pleasant excess, when taken with 
a glass of water flavored with anise. 

'^ These exaggerations of the fashions of 1862 have been suc- 
yeeded by equal travesties of the present modes. 



292 VENETIAN LIFE. 

The Gardens were made by Napoleon, who de- 
molished to that end some monasteries once cumber- 
ing the ground. They are pleasant enough, and are 
not gardens at all, but a park of formally-planted 
trees — sycamores, chiefly. I do not remember to 
have seen here any Venetians of the better class, ex- 
cept on the Mondays-of-the-Garden, in September. 
Usually the promenaders are fishermen, Austrian 
corporals, loutish youth of low degree, and Avomen 
too old and too poor to have any thing to do. Stran- 
gers go there, and the German visitors even drink the 
exceptionable beer which is sold in the wooden cot- 
tage on the little hillock at the end of the Gardens. 
There is also a stable — where are the only horses p 
in Venice. They are let at a florin an hour, and 
I do not know why the riders are always persons of 
the Hebrew faith. In a word, nothing can be drear- 
ier than the company in the Gardens, and nothing 
lovelier than the view they command, — from the 
sunset on the dome of the church of the Salute, all 
round the broad sweep of lagoon, to the tower at the 
port of San Nicolo, where you catch a glimpse of the 
Adriatic. 

The company is commonly stupid, but one even- 
ing, as we strolled idly through the walks, w^e came 
upon an interesting group —^ forty or fifty sailors, 
soldiers, youth of the people, gray-haired fishermen 
and contadini — sitting and lying on the grass, and 
listening with rapt attention to an old man reclining 
against a tree. I never saw a manner of sweeter or 
easier dignity than the speaker's. Nature is so lav- 



I 



VENETIAN HOLIDAYS. 293 

ish of her grace to these people that grow near her 
heart — the sun ! Infinite study could not have taught 
one northern-born the charm of oratory as this old 
man displayed it. I listened, and heard that he was 
speaking Tuscan. Do you guess with what he was 
enchanting his simple auditors ? Nothing less than 
" Orlando Furioso." They listened with the hun- 
griest delight, and when Ariosto's interpreter raised 
his finger and said, " Disse I'imperatore," or, " Or- 
lando disse, Carlomano mio," they hardly breathed. 

OfL the Lunedi dei Giardini, already mentioned, 
all orders of the people flock thither, and promenade, 
and banquet on the grass. The trees get back the 
voices of their dryads, and the children fill the aisles 
with glancing movement and graceful sport. 

Of course, the hand-organ seeks here its proper 
element, the populace, — but here it brays to a pe- 
culiarly beautiful purpose. For no sooner does it 
sound than the young girls of the people wreathe 
themselves into dances, and improvise the poetry of 
motion. Over the grass they whirl, and up and 
down the broad avenues, and no one of all the gen- 
tle and peaceable crowd molests or makes them 
afraid. It is a scene to make you believe in Miriam 
dancing with Donatello there in that old garden at 
Rome, and reveals a simple beauty in the nature of 
the Italian poor, which shall one day, I hope, be 
counted in their favor when they are called to an* 
sw^er for lying and swindling. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

CHEISTMAS HOLIDAYS. 

It often happens, even after the cold has an- 
nounced itself in Venice, that the hesitating winter 
lingers in the Tyrol, and a mellow Indian-summer 
weather has possession of the first weeks'of December. 
There was nothing in the December weather of 1863 
to remind us Northerners that Christmas was com- 
ing. The skies were as blue as those of June, the 
sun was warm, and the air w^as bland, with only now 
and then a trenchant breath from the Alps, coming 
like a delicate sarcasm from loveliness unwilling to 
be thought insipidly amiable. But if there was no 
warning in the weather, there were other signs of 
Christmas-time not to be mistaken : a certain foolish 
leaping of the heart in one's own breast, as if the 
dead raptures of childhood were stirred in their 
graves by the return of the happy season ; and in 
Venice, in weary, forlorn Venice, tliere was the half- 
unconscious tumult, the expectant bustle which cities 
feel at the approach of hohdays. The little shops 
put on their gayest airs ; there was a great clapping 
and hammering on the stalls and booths which were 
building in the campos ; the street-cries were more 
shrill and resonant than ever, and the air was shaken 
with the continual clangor of the church bells. 



CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS. 295 

All this note of preparation is rather bewildering 
to strangers, and is apt to disorder the best-disciplined 
intentions of seeing Christmas as the Venetians keep 
it. The public observance of the holiday in the 
churches and on the streets is evident and accessible 
to the most transient sojourner : but it is curious 
proof of the difficulty of knowledge concerning the 
in-door life and usages of the Italians, that I had al- 
ready spent two Christmases in Venice without 
learning any thing of their home celebration of the 
day. Perhaps a degree of like difficulty attends like 
inquiry everywhere, for the happiness of Christmas 
contracts the family circle more exclusively than ever 
around the home hearth, or the domestic scaldino, as 
the case may be. But, at any rate, I was quite 
ready to say that the observance of Christmas in 
Venice v/as altogether public, when I thought it 
a measure of far-sighted prudence to consult my 
barber. 

In all Latin countries the barber is a source of 
information, which, skillfully tapped, pours forth in a 
stream of endless gossip and local intelhgence. Every 
man talks w^ith his barber ; and perhaps a lingering 
dignity clings to this artist from his former profession 
of surgeon : it is certain the barber here prattles on 
with a freedom and importance perfectly admitted 
and respected by the interlocutory count under his 
razor. Those who care to know how things passed 
in an Italian barber shop three hundred years ago, 
may read it in Miss Evans's " Romola ; " those who 
are willing to see Nello alive and carrying on his art 



296 VENETIAN LIFE. 

in Venice at this day, must go to be shaved at his 
shop m the Frezzaria. Here there is a continual ex- 
change of gossip, and I have often hstened with profit 
to the sage and piquant remarks of the head barber 
and chief eiarlone^ on the different events of human 
Hfe brought to his notice. His shop is well known 
as a centre of scandal, and I have heard a fair Ve- 
netian declare that she had cut from her list all 
acquaintance who go there, as persons likely to be- 
come infected with the worst habits of gossip. 

To this Nello, however, I used to go only when in 
the most brilliant humor for listening, and my au- 
thority on Christmas observances is another and hum- 
bler barber, but not less a babbler, than the first. By 
birth, I beheve, he is a Mantuan, and he prides him- 
self on speaking Italian instead of Venetian. He 
has a defective eye, which obhges him to tack before 
bringing his razor to bear, but which is all the more 
favorable to conversation. On the whole, he is flat- 
tered to be asked about Christmas in Venice, and he 
first tells me that it is one of the chief holidays of 
the year : — 

"It is then,.Signore, that the Venetians have the 
custom to make three sorts of peculiar presents : 
Mustard, Fish, and Mandorlato. You must have 
seen the mustard in the shop windows : it is a thick 
conserve of fruits, flavored with mustard ; and the 
mandorlato is a candy made of honey, and filled with 
almonds. Well, they buy fish, as many as they will, 
and a vase of mustard, and a box of mandorlato, and 
make presents of them, one family to another, the 



CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS. 297 

day before Christmas. It is not too much for a rich 
family to present a hundred boxes of mandorlato and 
as many pots of mustard. These are exchanged be- 
tween friends in the city, and Venetians also send 
them to acquaintance in the country, whence the gift 
is returned in cakes and eggs at Easter. Christmas 
Eve people invite each other to great dinners, and eat 
and drink, and make merry ; but there are only fish 
and vegetables, for it is a meagre day, and meats are 
forbidden. This dinner lasts so long that, when it is 
over, it is almost time to go to midnight mass, which 
all must attend, or else hear three masses on the 
morrow ; and no doubt it was some delinquent who 
made our saying, — ' Long as a Christmas mass.' On 
Christmas Day people dine at home, keeping the day 
with family reunions. But the day after ! Ah-heigh ! 
That is the first of Carnival, and all the theatres are 
opened, and there is no end to the amusements — or 
was not, in the old time. Now, they never begin. 
A week later comes the day of the Lord's Circum- 
cision, and then the next holiday is Easter. The 
Nativity, the Circumcision, and the Resurrection — 
behold ! these are the three mysteries of the Chris- 
tian faith. Of what religion are the Americans, 
Signore?" 

I think I was justified in answering that we w^ere 
Christians. My barber was politely surprised. " But 
there are so many different religions," he said, in 
excuse. 

On the afternoon before Christmas I walked 
through the thronged Merceria to the Rialto Bridge, 



298 VENETIAN LIFE. 

where the tumultuous mart which opens at Piazza 
San Marco culminates in a deafening uproar of bar- 
gains. At this time the Merceria, or street of the 
shops, presents the aspect of a fair, and is arranged 
with a tastefulness and a cunning ability to make the 
most of every thing, which are seldom applied to the 
abundance of our fairs at home. The shops in Ve- 
nice are all very small, and the streets of lofty houses 
are so narrow and dark, that whatever goods are not 
exposed in the shop-windows are brought to the door 
to be clamored over by purchasers ; so that the Mer- 
ceria is roused by unusual effort to produce a more 
pronounced effect of traffic and noise than it always 
wears ; but now the effort had been made and the 
effect produced. The street was choked with the 
throngs, through which all sorts of peddlers battled 
their way and cried their wares. In Campo San 
Bartolomeo, into which the Merceria expands, at the 
foot of Rialto Bridge, holiday traffic had built enor- 
mous barricades of stalls, and entrenched itself be- 
hind booths, whence purchasers were assailed -with 
challenges to buy bargains. More than half the 
campo was paved with crockery from Rovigo and 
glass-ware from Murano ; clothing of every sort, and 
all kinds of small household wares, were offered for 
sale ; and among the other booths, in the proportion 
of two to one, were stalls of the inevitable Christmas 
mustard and mandorlato. 

But I cared rather for the crowd than what the 
crowd cared for. I had been lono; ao;o obho-ed to 
throw aside my preconceived notions of the Italian 



CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS. 299 

character, though they were not, I believe, more ab- 
surd than the impressions of others who have never 
studied Itahan character in Italy. I hardly know 
what of bacchantic joyousness I had not attributed 
to them on their holidays : a people living in a mild 
cHmate under such a lovely sky, with wine cheap and 
abundant, might not unreasonably have been expected 
to put on a show of the greatest jollity when enjoying 
themselves. Venetian crowds are always perfectly 
gentle and kindly, but they are also as a whole usu- 
ally serious ; and this Christmas procession, moving up 
and down the Merceria, and to and fro between the 
markets of Rialto, was in the fullest sense a solem- 
nity. It is true that the scene was dramatic, but the 
drama was not consciously comic. Whether these 
people bought or sold, or talked together, or walked 
up and down in silence, they were all equally in ear- 
nest. The crowd, in spite of its noisy bustle and pas- 
sionate uproar, did not seem to me a blithe or light- 
hearted crowd. Its sole activity was that of traffic, 
for, far more dearly than any Yankee, a Venetian 
loves a bargain, and puts his whole heart into uphold- 
ingi and beatino; down demands. 

Across the Bridge began the vegetable and fruit 
market, where whole Hollands of cabbage and Spains 
of onions opened on the view, with every other suc- 
culent and toothsome growth ; and beyond this we 
entered the glory of Rialto, the fish-market, which 
is now more lavishly supplied than at any other sea- 
son. It was picturesque and full of gorgeous color ; 
for the fish of Venice seem all to catch the rainbow 



300 VENETIAN LIFE. 

hues of the lagoon. There is a certain kind of red 
mullet, called triglia^ which is as rich and tender 
in its dyes as if it had never swam in water less 
£!:lorious than that which crimsons under October sun- 
sets. But a fish-market, even at Rialto, with fisher- 
men in scarlet caps and triglie in sunset splendors, 
is only a fish-market after all : it is wet and slimy un- 
der foot, and the innumerable gigantic eels, writhing 
everywhere, set the soul asquirm, and soon-sated 
curiosity slides willingly away. 

We had an appointment with a young Venetian 
lady to attend midnight mass at the church of San 
Moise, and thither about half-past eleven we went 
to welcome in Christmas. The church of San MoisS 
is in the highest style of the Renaissance art, which 
is, I believe, the lowest style of any other. The 
richly sculptured fa§ade is divided into stories ; the 
fluted columns are stilted upon pedestals, and their 
lines are broken by the bands which encircle them 
like broad barrel-hoops. At every possible point 
theatrical saints and angels, only sustained from fall- 
ing to the ground by iron bars let into their backs, 
start from the niches and cling to the sculpture. 
The outside of the church is in every way detestable, 
and the inside is consistently bad. All the side- altars 
have broken arches, and the high altar is built of 
rough blocks of marble to represent Mount Sinai, on 
which a melodramatic statue of Moses receives the 
tables of the law from God the Father, with frescoed 
seraphim in the background. For the same reason, 
I suppose, that the devout prefer a hideous Bambino 



CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS. 301 

and a Madonna in crinoline to the most graceful artistic 
conception of those sacred personages, San Mois§ is the 
most popular church for the midnight mass in Venice, 
and there is no mass at all in St. Mark's, where its 
magnificence would be so peculiarly impressive. 

On Christmas Eve, then, this church was crowded, 
and the door-ways were constantly thronged with 
people passing in and out. I was puzzled to see so 
many young men present, for Young Italy is not 
usually in great number at church ; but a friend 
explained the anomaly: ''After the guests at our 
Christmas Eve dinners have well eaten and drunken, 
they all go to mass in at least one church, and the 
younger offer a multiplied devotion by going to all. 
It is a good thing in some ways, for by this means 
they manage to see every pretty face in the city, 
which that night has specially prepared itself to be 
seen;" and from this slender text my friend began 
to discourse at large about these Christmas Eve 
dinners, and chiefly how jollily the priests fared, 
ending with the devout wish, " Would God had made 
me nephew of a canonico ! " The great dinners of 
the priests are a favorite theme with Italian talkers ; 
but I doubt it is after all only a habit of speech. 
The priests are too numerous to feed sumptuously in 
most cases. 

We had a good place to see and hear, sitting in 
the middle of the main aisle, directly over the dust 
of John Law, who alighted in Venice when his great 
Mississippi bubble burst, and died here, and now 
sleeps peacefully under a marble tablet in the ugly 



302 VENETIAN LIFE. 

church of San Mois^. The thought of that busy, 
ambitious Hfe, come to this unscheming repose under 
our feet, — so far from the scene of its hopes, suc- 
cesses, and defeats, — gave its own touch of solemnity 
to the time and place, and helped the offended sense of 
propriety through the bursts of operatic music, which 
interspersed the mass. But on the whole, the music 
was good and the function sufficiently impressive, — 
what with the gloom of the temple everywhere 
starred with tapers, and the grand altar lighted to 
the mountain-top. The singing of the priests also 
was here much better than I had found it elsewhere 
in Venice. 

The equality of all classes in church is a noticeable 
thing always in Italy, but on this Christmas Eve it 
Avas unusually evident. The rags of the beggar 
brushed the silks of luxury, as the wearers knelt side 
by side on the marble floor ; and on the night when 
God was born to poverty on earth, the rich seemed 
to feel that they drew nearer Him in the neighbor- 
hood of the poor. In these costly temples of the 
eldest Christianity, the poor seem to enter upon their 
inheritance of the future, for it is they who frequent 
them most and possess them with the deepest sense 
of ownership. The withered old woman, who creeps 
into St Mark's with her scaldino in her hand, takes 
visible possession of its magnificence as God's and 
hers, and Catholic wealth and rank would hardly, 
if challenged, dispute her claim. 

Even the longest mass comes to an end at last, 
and those of our party who could credit themselves 



CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS. 303 

With no gain of masses against the morrow, received 
the benediction at San Mois^ with peculiar unction. 
We all issued forth, and passing through the lines of 
young men who draw themselves up on either side 
of the doors of public places in Venice, to look at the 
young ladies as they come out, we entered the Place 
of St. Mark. The Piazza was more gloriously beauti- 
ful than ever I saw it before, and the church had a 
saintly loveliness. The moon was full, and snowed 
down the mellowest light on the gray domes, which 
in their soft, elusive outlines, and strange effect of 
far-withdrawal, rhymed like faint-heard refrains to 
the brio;ht and vivid arches of the facade. And if 
the bronze horses had been minded to quit their sta- 
tion before the great window over the central arch, 
they might have paced around the night's whole half- 
world, and found no fairer resting-place. 

As for Christmas Day in Venice, it amounted to 
very little ; every thing was closed, and whatever 
merry-making went on was all w^ithin doors. Al- 
though the shops and the places of amusement were 
opened the day following, the city entered very 
sparingly on the pleasures of Carnival, and Christ- 
mas week passed off in every-day fashion. It will be 
remembered that on St. Stephen's Day — the first 
of Carnival — one of the five annual banquets took 
place at the Ducal Palace in the time of the Repub- 
lic. A certain number of patricians received invita- 
tions to the dinner, and those for whom there was no 
room were presented with fish and poultry by the 
Doge. The populace were admitted to look on dur- 



304 VENETIAN LIFE. 

ing the first course, and then, having sated their 
appetites with this savory observance, were invited 
to withdraw. The patriotic Giustina Renier-Michiel 
of course makes much of the courtesy thus extended 
to the people by the State, but I cannot help thinking 
it must have been hard to bear. The banquet, how- 
ever, has passed away with the Republic which gave 
it, and the only savor of dinner which Venetian 
poverty now inhales on St. Stephen's Day, is that 
which arises from its own proper pot of broth. 

New Year's is the carnival of the beggars in 
Venice. Their business is carried on briskly through- 
out the year, but on this day it is pursued with an 
unusual degree of perseverance, and an enterprise 
worthy of all disinterested admiration. At every 
corner, on every bridge, under every door-way, hide- 
ous shapes of poverty, mutilation, and deformity stand 
waiting, and thrust out palms, plates, and pans, and 
advance good wishes and blessings to all who pass. 
It is an immemorial custom, and it is one in which 
all but the quite comfortable classes participate. The 
facchini in every square take up their collections ; 
the gondoliers have their plates prepared for contri- 
bution at every ferry ; at every caffe and restaurant 
begging-boxes appeal to charity. Whoever has lifted 
hand in your service in any way during the past 
year expects a reward on New Year's for the com- 
plaisance, and in some cases the shop-keepers send 
to wish you a hel capo d'anno^ with the same practical 
end in view. On New Year's Eve and morning 
bands of facchini and gondoliers go about howling 



CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS. 305 

vivas under charitable windows till they open and 
drop alms. The Piazza is invaded by the legions of 
beggary, and held in overpowering numbers against 
all comers ; and to traverse it is like a progress 
through a lazar-house. 

Beyond encouraging so gross an abuse as this, I 
do not know that Venice celebrates New Year's in 
a peculiar manner. It is a festa^ and there are 
masses, of course. Presents are exchanged, which 
consist cniefly of books —printed for the season, and 
brilliant outside and dull within, like all annuals. 



20 



CHAPTER XIX. 

LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING ; BAPTISMS AND 
BURIALS. 

The Venetians have had a practical and strictly 
business-like way of arranging marriages from the 
earliest times. The shrewdest provision has always 
been made for the dower and for the good of the 
State ; private and public interest being consulted, the 
small matters of affections have been left to the 
chances of association ; and it does not seem that 
Venetian society has ever dealt severely with hus- 
bands or wives whom incompatibilities forced to seek 
consolation outside of matrimony. Herodotus relates 
that the Illyrian Veneti sold their daughters at auc- 
tion to the highest bidder ; and the fair being thus 
comfortably placed in life, the hard-favored were 
given to whomsoever would take them, with such 
dower as might be considered a reasonable compen- 
sation. The auction was discontinued in Christian 
times, but marriage contracts still partook of the form 
of a pubhc and half - mercantile transaction. At 
a comparatively late period Venetian fathers went 
with their daughters to a great annual matrimonial 
fair at San Pietro di Castello Olivolo, and the youth 
of the lagoons repaired thither to choose wives from 



LOYE-MAKING AND MAERYING. 307 

the number of the maidens. These were all dressed 
in white, with hair loose about the neck, and each bore 
her dower in a little box, slung over her shoulder by 
a ribbon. It is to be supposed that there was com- 
monly a previous understanding between each dam- 
sel and some youth in the crowd : as soon as all had 
paired off, the bishop gave them a sermon and his 
benediction, and the young men gathered up their 
brides and boxes, and went away wedded. It was 
on one of these occasions, in the year 944, that the 
Triestine pirates stole the Brides of Venice with 
their dowers, and gave occasion to the Festa delle 
Marie, already described, and to Rogers's poem, 
which every body pretends to have read. 

This going to San Pietro's, selecting a wife and 
marrying her on the spot, out of hand, could only 
have been the contrivance of a straightforward, prac- 
tical race. Among the common people betrothals 
were managed with even greater ease and dispatch, 
till a very late day in history ; and in the record of 
a certain trial which took place in 1443 there is an 
account of one of these brief and unceremonious 
courtships. Donna Catarussa, who gives evidence, 
and whom I take to have been a worthless, idle 
gossip, was one day sitting at her door, when Piero 
di Trento passed, selling brooms, and said to her, 
" Madonna, find me some nice girl." To which 
Donna Catarussa replied, " Ugly fool ! do you take 
me for a go-between?" ''No," said Piero, ''not 
that; I mean a girl to be my wife." And as Donna 
Catarussa thought at once of a suitable match, she 



308 VENETIAN LIFE. 

said, " In faith of God, I know one for you. Come 
again to-morrow." So they both met next day, 
and the woman chosen by Donna Catarussa being 
asked, '* Wouldst thou hke to have Piero for thy 
husband, as God commands and holy Church ? " 
she answered, " Yes." And Peter being asked 
the hke question, answered, " Why, yes, certainly." 
And they went off and had the wedding feast. A 
number of these betrothals takes place in the last 
scene of Goldoni's " Baruffe Chiozzotte," where the 
belligerent women and their lovers take hands in the 
public streets, and saluting each other as man and 
wife, are affianced, and get married as quickly as 
possible : — 

" Checa (to Tofolo). Take my hand. 

" Tofolo. Wife ! 

" Checa. Husband! 

" Tofolo. Hurra ! " 

The betrothals of the Venetian nobles were cel- 
ebrated with as much pomp and ceremony as could 
possibly distinguish them from those of the people, 
and there w^as much more polite indifference to the 
inclinations of the parties immediately concerned. 
The contract was often concluded before the be- 
trothed had seen each other, by means of a third 
person, when the amount of the dower was fixed. 
The bridegroom elect having verbally agreed with 
the parents of the bride, repaired at an early day 
to the court-yard of the Ducal Palace, where the 
match was published, and where he shook hands 
with his kinsmen and friends. On the day fixed 



LOYE-MAKING AND MARRYING. 809 

for signing the contract the bride's father invited to 
his house the bridegroom and all his friends, and 
hither came the high officers of state to compliment 
the future husband. He, with the father of his 
betrothed, met the guests at the door of the palace, 
and conducted them to the grand saloon, which 
no woman was allowed (sz figuri /) at this time to 
enter. When the company was seated, the bride, 
clad in white, was led from, her rooms and pre- 
sented. She wore a crown of pearls and brilliants 
on her head, and her hair, mixed with long threads 
of gold, fell loose about her shoulders, as you may 
see it in Carpaccio's pictures of the Espousals of 
St. Ursula. Her ear-rings were pendants of three 
pearls set in gold ; her neck and throat were bare 
but for a collar of lace and gems, from which slid 
a fine jeweled chain into her bosom. Over her 
breast she wore a stomacher of cloth of gold, to which 
were attached her sleeves, open from the elbow to 
the hand. The formal words of espousal being pro- 
nounced, the bride paced slowly round the hall to 
the music of fifes and trumpets, and made a gentle 
inclination to each of the guests ; and then returned 
to her chamber, from which she issued again on the 
arrival of any tardy friend, and repeated the cere- 
mony. After all this, she descended to the court- 
yard, where she was received by gentlewomen, her 
friends, and placed on a raised seat (which was cov- 
ered with rich stuffs) in an open gondola, and thus, 
followed by a fleet of attendant gondolas, went to 
visit all the convents in which there were kinspeople 



310 TENETIAN LIFE. 

of herself or her betrothed. The excessive pubhcity 
of these ceremonies was supposed to strengthen the 
vahdity of the marriage contract. At an early day 
after the espousals the betrothed, preceded by musi- 
cians and followed by relatives and friends, went at 
dawn to be married in the church, — the bridegroom 
wearing a toga, and the bride a dress of white silk 
or crimson velvet, with jewels in her hair, and pearls 
embroidered on her robes. Visits of congratulation 
followed, and on the same day a public feast was 
given in honor of the wedding, to which at least 
three hundred persons were always invited, and at 
which the number, quality, and cost of the dishes 
were carefully regulated by the Republic's laws. 
On this occasion, one or more persons were chosen 
as governors of the feast, and after the tables were 
removed, a mock-heroic character appeared, and re- 
counted with absurd exaggeration the deeds of the 
ancestors of the bride and groom. The next morn- 
ing ristorativi of sweetmeats and confectionery were 
presented to the happy couple, by whom the presents 
were returned in kind. 

A splendor so exceptional, even in the most 
splendid age of the most splendid city, as that which 
marked the nuptial feasts of the unhappy Jacopo 
Foscari, could not be left unnoticed in this place. 
He espoused Lucrezia, daughter of Lionardo Con- 
tarini, a noble as rich and magnificent as Jacopo's 
own father, the Doge ; and, on the 29th of January, 
1441, the noble Eustachio Balbi being chosen lord 
of the feasts, the bridegroom, the bride's brother, 



LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING. 311 

and eighteen other patrician youths, assembled in 
the Palazzo Balbi, whence they went on horseback 
to conduct Lucrezia to the Ducal Palace. They 
were all sumptuously dressed in crimson velvet and 
silver brocade of Alexandria, and rode chargers su- 
perbly caparisoned. Other noble friends attended 
them ; musicians went before ; a troop of soldiers 
brought up the rear. They thus proceeded to the 
court-yard of the Ducal Palace, and then, returning, 
traversed the Piazza, and threading the devious little 
streets to the Campo San Samuele, there crossed the 
Grand Canal upon a bridge of boats, to San Barnaba 
opposite, where the Contarini lived. On their arrival 
at this place the bride, supported by two Procuratori 
di San Marco, and attended by sixty ladies, descended 
to the church and heard mass, after which an oration 
w^as delivered in Campo San Barnaba before the 
Doge, the ambassadors, and a multitude of nobles 
and people, in praise of the spouses and their families. 
The bride then returned to her father's house, and 
jousts took place in the campos of Santa Maria For- 
mosa and San Polo (the largest in the city), and in 
the Piazza San Marco. The Doge gave a great 
banquet, and at its close one hundred and fifty ladies 
proceeded to the bride's palace in the Bucintoro, 
where one hundred other ladies joined them, to- 
gether with Lucrezia, who, seated between Fran- 
cesco Sforza (then General-in-chief of the Republic's 
armies) and the Florentine ambassador, was con- 
ducted, amid the shouts of the people and the sound 
of trumpets, to the Ducal Palace. The Doge re- 



312 VENETIAN LIFE. 

ceived her at the riva of the Plazzetta, and, with 
Sforza and Balbi led her to the foot of the palace 
stairs, where the Dogaressa, with sixty ladies, wel- 
comed her. A state supper ended this day's rejoic- 
ings, and on the following day a tournament took 
place in the Piazza, for a prize of cloth of gold, which 
was offered by Sforza. Forty knights contested the 
prize and supped afterward with the Doge. On the 
next day there were processions of boats with music 
on the Grand Canal ; on the fourth and last day 
there were other jousts for prizes offered by the 
jewelers and Florentine merchants ; and every night 
there were dancing and feasting in the Ducal Palace, 
The Doo;e was himself the piver of the last tourna- 
ment, and with this the festivities came to an end. 

I have read an account by an old-fashioned English 
traveler of a Venetian marriage which he saw, sixty 
or seventy years ago, at the church of San Giorgio 
Maggiore : " After a crowd of nobles," he says, 
" in their usual black robes, had been some time in 
attendance, the gondolas appearing, exhibited a fine 
show, though all of them were painted of a sable hue, 
in consequence of a sumptuary law, which is very 
necessary in this place, to prevent an expense which 
many who could not bear it would incur ; neverthe- 
less the barcarioli, or boatmen, were dressed in 
handsome liveries ; the gondolas followed one another 
in a line, each carrying two ladies, who w^ere like- 
wise dressed in black. As they landed they arranged 
themselves in order, forming a line from the gate to 
the great altar. At length the bride, arrayed in 



LOYE-MAKING AND MARRYING. 318 

white as the symbol of innocence, led by the brides- 
man, ascended the stairs of the landirig-place. There 
she received the compliments of the bridegroom, in 
his black toga, who walked at her right hand to the 
altar, where they and all the company kneeled. I 
was often afraid the poor young creature would have 
sunk upon the ground before she arrived, for she 
trembled with great agitation, while she made her 
low courtesies from side to side : however, the cere- 
mony was no. sooner performed than she seemed to 
recover her spirits, and looked matrimony in the face 
w^ith a determined smile. Indeed, in all appearance 
she had nothing to fear from her husband, whose age 
and aspect were not at all formidable ; accordingly 
she tripped back to the gondola with great activity 
and resolution, and the procession ended as it began. 
Though there was something attractive in this 
aquatic parade, the black hue of the boats and the 
company presented to a stranger, like me, the idea of 
a funeral rather than a wedding. My expectation was 
raised too high b}' the previous description of the 
Italians, who are much given to hyperbole, who gave 
me to understand that this procession would far ex- 
ceed any thing I had ever seen. When I reflect 
upon this rhodomontade," disdainfully adds Mr. 
Drummond, " I cannot help comparing, in my mem- 
ory, the paltry procession of the Venetian marriage 
with a very august occurrence of which I was eye- 
witness in Sweden," and which being the reception 
of their Swedish Majesties by the British fleet, I am 
sure the reader will not ask me to quote. 



814 VENETIAN LIFE. 

With change of government, changes of civiliza- 
tion following the revolutions, and the decay of 
wealth among the Venetian nobles, almost all their 
splendid customs have passed away, and the habit 
of making wedding presents of sweetmeats and con- 
fectionery is perhaps the only relic which has de- 
scended from the picturesque past to the present 
time. These gifts are still exchanged not only by 
nobles, but by all commoners according to their 
means, and are sometimes a source of very profuse 
outlay. It is the habit to send the candies in the 
elegant and costly paper caskets which the confec- 
tioners sell, and the sum of a thousand florins scarcely 
suffices to pass the courtesy round a moderately large 
circle of friends. 

With the nobility and w^ith the richest commoners 
marriage is still greatly a matter of contract, and is 
arranged without much reference to the principals, 
though it is now scarcely probable in any case that 
they have not seen each other. But w^ith all other 
classes, except the poorest, w^ho cannot and do not 
seclude the youth of either sex from each other, and 
with w4iom, consequently, romantic contrivance and 
subterfuge would be superfluous, love is made to-day 
in Venice as in the capa y espada comedies of the 
Spaniards, and the business is carried on with all the 
cumbrous machinery of confidants, billets-doux, and 
stolen interviews. 

Let us take our nominal friends, Marco and 
Todaro, and attend them in their solemn promenade 
under the arcades of the Procuratie, or upon the 



LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING. 316 

Molo, whither they go every evening to taste the 
air and to look at the ladies, while the Austrians and 
the other foreigners listen to the military music in 
the Piazza. They are both young, our friends ; they 
have both glossy silk hats ; they have both light 
canes and an innocent swagger. Inconceivably mild 
are these youth, and in their talk indescribably small 
and commonplace. 

They look at the ladies, and suddenly Todaro feels 
the consuming ardors of love. 

Todaro (to Marco). Here, dear! Behold this 
beautiful blonde here ! Beautiful as an angel ! But 
what loveliness ! 

Marco. But where ? 

Todaro. It is enough. Let us go. I follow 
her. 

Such is the force of the passion in southern hearts. 
They follow that beautiful blonde, who, marching 
demurely in front of the gray-moustached papa and 
the fat mamma, after the fashion in Venice, is elec- 
trically conscious of pursuit. They follow her dur- 
ing the whole evening, and, at a distance, softly follow 
her home, where the burning Todaro photographs 
the number of the house upon the sensitized tablets 
of his soul. 

This is the first great step in love : he has seen his 
adored one, and he knows that he loves her with an 
inextinguishable ardor. The next advance is to be 
decided between himself and the faithful Marco, and 
is to be debated over many cups of black coffee, not 
to name glasses of sugar-and-water and the like ex- 



316 VENETIAN LIFE. 

citing beverages. The friends may now find out the 
cafFd which the Biondina frequents with her parents, 
and to which Todaro may go every evening and feast 
his eyes upon her lovehness, never making his regard 
known by any word, till some night, when he has 
followed her home, he steals speech with her as he 
stands in the street under her balcony, — and looks 
sufficiently sheepish as people detect him on their 
late return from the theatre.* Or, if the friends do 
not take this course in their courtship (for they are 
both engaged in the wooing), they decide that To- 
daro, after walking back and forth a sufficient num- 
ber of times in the street where the Biondina lives, 
shall write her a tender letter, to demand if she be 
disposed to correspond his love. This billet must 
always be conveyed to her by her serving-maid, who 
must be bribed by Marco for the purpose. At every 
juncture Marco must be consulted, and acquainted 
with every step of progress ; and no doubt the Bion- 
dina has some lively Moretta for her friend, to whom 
she confides her part of the love-affair in all its 
intricacy. 

It may likewise happen that Todaro shall go to see 
the Biondina in church, w^hither, but for her pres- 
ence, he would hardly go, and that there, though he 
may not have speech with her, he shall still fan the 
ardors of her curiosity and pity by persistent sighs. 
It must be confessed that if the Biondina is not 
pleased with his looks, his devotion must assume the 

=* The love-making scenes in Goldoni's comedy of IL Bugiardo 
are photographically faithful to present usage in Venice. 



LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING. 317 

character of an intolerable bore to her ; and that 
to see him everywhere at her heels — to behold him 
leaning against the pillar near which she kneels at 
church, the head of his stick in his mouth, and his 
attitude carefully taken with a view to captivation 

— to be always in deadly fear lest she shall meet him 
in promenade, or, turning round at the caff^ encoun- 
ter his pleading gaze — that all this must drive the 
Biondina to a state bordering upon blasphemy and 
finger-nails, iffa, come si fa f Oi vuol pazienza I 
This is the sole course open to ingenuous youth in 
Venice, where confessed and unashamed acquaint- 
ance between young people is extremely difficult ; 
and so this blind pursuit must go on, till the Biondi- 
na's inclinations are at last laboriously ascertained. 

Suppose the Biondina consents to be loved ? Then 
Todaro has just and proper inquiries to make con- 
cerning her dower, and if her fortune is as pleasing 
as herself, he has only to demand her in marriage of 
her father, and after that to make her acquaintance. 

One day a Venetian friend of mine, who spoke a 
little English, came to me with a joyous air and said : 

"- 1 am in lofe." 

The recipient of repeated confidences of this kind 
from the same person, I listened with tempered 
effusion. 

'' It is a blonde again ? " 

" Yes, you have right ; blonde again." 

"And pretty?" 

*' Oh, but beautiful ! I lofe her — come si dice ! 

— ifnmensamente.^^ 



818 VENETIAN LIFE. 

*'And where did you see her? Where did you 
make her acquaintance ? " 

'' I have not make the acquaintance. I see her 
pass with his fazer every night on Rialto Bridge, 
We did not spoke yet — only w^ith the eyes. The 
lady is not of Venice. She has four thousand florins. 
It is not much — no. But ! " 

Is not this love at first sight almost idylhc ? Is 
it not also a subhme prudence to know the lady's 
fortune better than herself, before herself? These 
passionate, headlong Italians look well to the main 
chance before they leap into matrimony, and you 
may be sure Todaro knows, in black and white, 
what the Biondina has to her fortune before he 
weds her. After that may come the marriage, and 
the sonnet written by the next of friendship, and 
printed to hang up in all the shop-windows, cele- 
brating the auspicious event. If he be rich, or can 
WTite nohile after his Christian name, perhaps some 
abbate, elegantly addicted to verses and alive to 
grateful consequences, may publish a poem, elegantly 
printed by the matchless printers at Rovigo, and send 
it to all the bridegroom's friends. It is not the only 
event which the facile Venetian Muse shall sing for 
him. If his child is brought happily through the 
measles by Dottor Cavasangue, the Nine shall cele- 
brate the fact. If he takes any pubhc honor or 
scholastic degree, it is equal occasion for verses ; and 
when he dies the mortuary rhyme shall follow him. 
Indeed, almost every occurrence — a boy's success 
at school, an advocate's triumphal passage of the 



LOVE-MAKING AND MARRYING. 319 

perils of examination at Padua, a priest's first mass, 
a nun's novitiate, a birth, an amputation ^— is the 
subject of tuneful effusion, and no less the occasion 
of a visit from the facchini of the neighboring campo, 
who assemble with blare of trumpets and tumult of 
voices around the victim's door, and proclaim his 
skill or good fortune, and break into vivas that never 
end till he bribes their enthusiasm into silence. The 
naive commonplaceness of feeling in all matrimonial 
transactions, in spite of the gloss which the operatic 
methods of courtship threw about them, was a source 
of endless amusement, as it stole out in different 
ways. '' You know my friend Marco ? " asked an 
acquaintance one day. '' Well, we are looking out a 
wife for him. He does n't want to marry, but his 
father insists ; and he has begged us to find some- 
body. There are three of us on the look-out. But 
lie hates women, and is very hard to suit. Ben ! 
Ci viiol pazienza ! " 

It rarely happens noAV that the religious part of 
the marriage ceremony is not performed in church, 
though it may be performed at the house of the 
bride. In this case, it usually takes place in the 
evening, and the spouses attend five o'clock mass 
next morning. But if the marriage takes place at 
church, it must be between five and eleven in the 
morning, and the blessing is commonly pronounced 
about six o'clock. Civil marriage is still unknown 
among the Venetians. It is entirely the affair of the 
Church, in which the bans are published beforehand, 
and which exacts from the candidates a preliminary 



320 VENETIAN LIFE. 

visit to their parish priest, for examination in their 
catechism, and for instruction in rehgion when they 
are defective in knowledge of the kind. There is no 
longer any civil publication of the betrothals, and the 
hand-shaking in the court of the Ducal Palace has 
long been disused. I cannot help thinking that the 
ceremony must have been a great affliction, and that, 
in the Republican times at Venice, a bridegroom must 
have fared nearly as hard as a President elect in our 
times at home. 

There was a curious display on occasion of births 
among the nobility in former times. The room of 
the young mother was decorated with a profusion of 
paintings, sculpture, and jewelry ; and, w^hile yet in 
bed, she received the congratulations of her friends, 
and regaled them with sweetmeats served in vases of 
gold and silver. 

The child of noble parents had always at least two 
godfathers, and sometimes as many as a hundred and 
fifty ; but in order that the relationship of godfather 
(which is the same according to the canonical law 
as a tie of consanguinity) should not prevent desira- 
ble matrimony between nobles, no patrician was al- 
lowed to be godfather to another's child. Conse- 
quently the compare was usually a client of the 
noble parent, and was not expected to make any pres- 
ent to the godchild, whose father, on the day follow- 
ing the baptism, sent him a piece of marchpane, in 
acknowledgment of their relationship. No women 
were present at the baptism except those who had 
charge of the babe. After the fall of the Republic 



BAPTISMS AND BURIALS. 321 

the French custom of baptism in the parents' house 
was introduced, as well as the custom, on the god- 
father's part, of giving a present, — usually of sugar- 
plums and silver toys. But I think that most bap- 
tisms still take place in church, if I may judge from 
the numbers of tight little glass cases I have no- 
ticed, — half bed and half coJffin, — containing little 
eight-day-old Venetians, closely swathed in mummy- 
like bandages, and borne to and from the churches 
by mysterious old women. The ceremony of baptism 
itself does not apparently differ from that in other 
Catholic countries, and is performed, like all religious 
services in Italy, without a ray of religious feeling or 
solemnity of any kind. 

For many centuries funeral services in Venice 
have been conducted by the Scuole del 'Sacramento^ 
instituted for that purpose. To one of these societies 
the friends of the defunct pay a certain sum, and the 
association engages to inter the dead, and bear all the 
expenses of the ceremony, the dignity of which is 
regulated by the priest of the parish in which the 
deceased lived. The rite is now most generally 
undertaken by the Scuola di San Rocco. The fu- 
neral train is of ten or twenty facchini, wearing tunics 
of white, with caps and capes of red, and bearing the 
society's long, gilded candlesticks of wood with lighted 
tapers. Priests follow them chanting prayers, and 
then comes the bier, — with a gilt crown lying on 
the coffin, if the dead be a babe, to indicate the 
triumph of innocence. Formerly, hired mourners 
attended, and a candle, weighing a pound, was given 

21 



822 VENETIAN LIFE. 

to any one who chose to carry it m the proces- 
sion. 

Anciently there was great show of mournmg in 
Venice for the dead, when, according to Mutinelli, 
the friends and kinsmen of the deceased, having seen 
his body deposited in the church, '' fell to w^eepmg 
and howling, tore their hair and rent their clothes, 
and withdrew forever from that church, thenceforth 
become for them a place of abomination." Decenter 
customs prevailed in after-times, and there was a pa- 
thetic dignity in the ceremony of condolence among 
patricians : the mourners, on the day following the 
interment, repaired to the porticos of Rialto and the 
court of the Ducal Palace, and their friends came, 
one after one, and expressed their sympathy by a 
mute pressure of the hand. 

Death, however, is hushed up as much as possible 
in modern Venice. The corpse is hurried from the 
house of mourning to the parish church, where the 
friends, after the funeral service, take leave of it. 
Then it is placed in a boat and carried to the burial- 
ground, where it is quickly interred. I was fortunate, 
therefore, in witnessing a cheerful funeral at which 
I one day casually assisted at San Michele. There 
was a church on this island as early as the tenth 
century, and in the thirteenth century it fell into the 
possession of the Comandulensen Friars. They built 
a monastery on it, which became famous as a seat of 
learning, and gave much erudite scholarship to the 
world. In later times Pope Gregory* XVI. carried 
his profound learning from San Michele to the Vati- 



BAPTISMS AND BURIALS. 323 

can. The present church is in the Renaissance 
style, but not very offensively so, and has some in- 
different paintings. The arcades and the courts 
around which it is built contain funeral monuments 
as unutterably ugly and tasteless as any thing of the 
kind I ever saw at home ; but the dead, for the 
most part, lie in graves marked merely by little iron 
crosses in the narrow and roofless space walled in 
from the lagoon, which laps sluggishly at the foot 
of the masonry with the impulses of the tide. The 
old monastery was abolished in 1810, and there 
is now a convent of Reformed Benedictines on 
the island, who perform the last service for the 
dead. 

On the day of which I speak, I w^as taking a friend 
to see the objects of interest at San Michele, which 
I had seen before, and the funeral procession touched 
at the riva of the church just as we arrived. The 
procession was of one gondola only, and the pall- 
bearers were four pleasant ruffians in scarlet robes 
of cotton, hooded, and girdled at the waist. They 
were accompanied by a priest of a broad and jolly 
countenance, two grinning boys, and finally the 
corpse itself, severely habited in an under-dress of 
black box, but wearing an outer garment of red 
velvet, bordered and tasseled gayly. The pleasant 
ruffians (who all wore smoking-caps with some other 
name) placed this holiday corpse upon a bier, and 
after a lively dispute with our gondolier, in which 
the compliments of the day were passed in the usual 
terms of Venetian chaff, lifted the bier on shore and 



324 VENETIAN LIFE. 

set it down. The priest followed with the two boys, 
whom he rebuked for levity, simultaneously tripping 
over the Latin of a prayer, wdth his eyes fixed on 
our harmless little party as if we were a funeral, and 
the dead in the black box an indifferent spectator. 
Then he popped down upon his knees, and made 
us a lively little supplication, while a blind beggar 
scuffled for a lost soldo about his feet, and the gondo- 
liers quarreled volubly. After which, he threw off 
his.surphce with the air of one who should say his 
day's work was done, and preceded the coffin into 
the church. 

We had hardly deposited the bier upon the floor in 
the centre of the nave, when two pale young friars 
appeared, throwing off their hooded cloaks of coarse 
brown, as they passed to the sacristy, and reappearing 
in their rope-girdled gowns. One of them bore a 
lighted taper in his right hand and a book in his left ; 
the other had also a taper, but a pot of holy w^ater 
instead of the book. 

They are very handsome young men, these monks, 
wdth heavy, sad eyes, and graceful, slender figures, 
which their monastic life will presently overload with 
gross humanity full of coarse appetites. They go 
and stand beside the bier, giving a curious touch of 
solemnity to a scene composed of the four pleasant 
ruffians in the loaferish postures which they have 
learned as facchini v/aiting for jobs ; of the two boys 
w^ith inattentive grins, and of the priest with wander- 
ing eyes, kneeling behind them. 

A weak, thin-voiced organ pipes huskily from its 



BAPTISMS AND BURIALS. 325 

damp loft : the monk hurries rapidly over the Latin 
text of the service, while 

" His breath to heaven hke vapor goes " 

on the chilly, humid air ; and the other monk makes 
the responses, giving and taking the sprinkler, which 
his chief shakes vaguely in the direction of the cofRn. 
They both bow their heads — shaven down to the 
temples, to simulate His crown of thorns. Silence. 
The organ is still, the priest has vanished ; the tapers 
are blown out ; the pall-bearers lay hold of the bier, 
and raise it to their shoulders ; the boys slouch into 
procession behind them ; the monks glide softly and 
dispiritedly away. The soul is prepared for eternal 
life, and the body for the grave. 

The ruffians are expansively gay on reaching the 
open air again. They laugh, they call " Cio ! " * 
continually, and banter each other as they trot to the 
grave. 

The boys follow them, gamboling among the little 

^Literally, That in Italian, and meaning in Venetian, Youl 
Heigh ! To talk in Cid ciappa is to assume insolent familiarity 
or unbounded good fellowship with the person addressed. A 
Venetian says Cid a tliousand times in a day, and hails every one 
but his superior in that way. I think it is hardly the Italian 
pronoun, but rather a contraction of Veccio (vecchio), Old fellow ! 
It is common with all classes of the people : parents use it in 
speaking to their children, and brothers and sisters call one 
another Cid. It is a salutation between friends, who cry out, 
Cid ! as they pass in the street. Acquaintances, men who meet 
after separation, rush together with "Ah Cid!'' Then they 
kiss on the right cheek, " Cid ! " on the left, " Cid ! '' on the lips, 
'' Cid ! Bon di Cid I '' 



326 VENETIAN LIFE. 

iron crosses, and trying if here and there one of them 
may not be overthrown. 

We two strangers follow the boys. 

But here the pall-bearers become puzzled : on the 
right is an open trench, on the left is an open trench. 
" Presence of the Devil ! To which grave does this 
dead belong?" They discuss, they dispute, they 
quarrel. 

From the side of the wall, as if he rose from the 
sea, appears the grave-digger, with his shovel on his 
shoulder — slouching toward us. 

"Ah heigh! Cio, the grave-digger! Where 
does this dead belong ? " 

^' Body of Bacchus, what potatoes ! Here, in this 
trench to the right." 

They set down the bier there, gladly. They strip 
away the coffin's gay upper garment ; they leave but 
the under-dress of black box, painted to that favor 
with pitch. They shove it into the grave-digger's 
arms, where he stands in the trench, in the soft earth, 
rich with bones. He lets it slide swiftly to the 
ground — thump ! Ecco fatto ! 

The two boys pick up the empty bier, and dance 
merrily away with it to the riva-gate, feigning a little 
play after the manner of children, — " Oh, what a 
beautiful dead ! " 

The eldest of the pleasant* ruffians is all the pleas- 
anter for sciampagyiin^ and can hardly be persuaded 
to xTo out at the ricrlit irate. 

We strangers stay behind a little, to consult with 
another spectator — Venetian, this. 



BAPTISMS AND BURIALS. 827 

" Who is the dead man, signore ? " 

" It is a woman, poor little thing ! Dead in child* 
bed. The baby is in there with her." 

It has been a cheerful fmieral, and yet we are not 
in great spirits as we go back to the city. 

For my part, I do not think the cry of sea-gulls 
on a gloomy day is a joyous sound ; and the sight 
of those theatrical angels, with their shameless, un- 
finished backs, flying off the top of the rococo fagade 
of the church of the Jesuits, has always been a spec- 
tacle to fill me with despondency and foreboding. 



CHAPTER XX. 

VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. ' 

On a small canal, not far from the railroad station, 
the gondoliers show you a house, by no means nota- 
ble (except for the noble statue of a knight, occupy- 
ing a niche in one corner), as the house of Othello. 
It was once the palace of the patrician family Moro, 
a name well known in the annals of the Republic, 
and one which, it has been suggested, misled Shakes- 
peare into the invention of a Moor of Venice. 
Whether this is possibly the fact, or whether there is 
any tradition of a tragic incident in the history of the 
Moro family similar to that upon which the play is 
founded, I do not know ; but it is certain that the 
story of Othello, very nearly as Shakespeare tells it, 
is popularly known in Venice; and the gondoliers 
have fixed upon the Casa Moro in question as the 
edifice best calculated to give satisfaction to^strangers 
in search of the True and the Memorable. The 
statue is happily darkened by time, and thus serves 
admirably to represent Othello's complexion, and to 
place beyond the shadow of a doubt the fact of his 
residence in the house. Indee'd, what can you say to 
the gondolier, who, in answer to your cavils, points 
to the knight, with the convincing argument, '^ There 
is his statue ! " 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 329 

One day I was taken to see this house, in company 
with some friends, and when it had been victoriously 
pointed out, as usual, we asked meekly, ''Who was 
Othello ? " 

" Othello, Signori," answered the gondolier, " was 
. a general of the Republic, in the old times. He was 
an African, and black ; but nevertheless the State 
valued him, and he beat the Turks in many battles. 
Well, Signori, this general Othello had a very young 
and beautiful wife, and his wife's cousin (szc /) Cassio 
was his major-domo, or, as some say, his lieutenant. 
But after a while happens along (^capita) another sol- 
dier of Othello, who wants Cassio's employment, and 
so accuses him to the general of corrupting his wife. 
Very well, Signori ! Without thinking an instant, 
Othello, being made so, flew into a passion (sz ris- 
caldo la testa) ^ and killed his wife; and then when 
her innocence came out, he killed himself and that 
liar ; and the State confiscated his goods, he being a 
very rich man. There has been a tragedy written 
about all this, you know." 

" But how is it called ? Who wrote it ? " 

" Oh ! in regard to that, then, I don't know. 
Some Englishman." 

" Shakespeare ? " 

" I don't know, Signori. But if you doubt what 
I tell you, go to any bookseller, and say, ' Favor me 
with the tragedy of " Othello." ' He will give it 
you, and there you will find it all written out just 
as I tell it." 

This gondolier confirmed the authenticity of his 



330 VENETIAN LIFE. » 

story, by showing us the house of Cassio near the 
Rialto Bridge, and I have no doubt he would also 
have pointed out that of lago if we had wished it. 

But as a general thing, the lore of the gondoliers 
IS not rich nor very great. They are a loquacious 
and a gossiping race, but they love better to have a 
quiet chat at the tops of their voices, as they loaf idly 
at the ferries, or to scream repartees across the Grand 
Canal, than to tell stories. In all history that relates 
to localities they are sufficiently versed to find the 
notable places for strangers, but beyond this they 
trouble themselves as little with the past as with the 
future. Three tragic legends, however, they know, 
and will tell with the most amusing effect, namely : 
Biasio, luganegher ; the Innocent Baker-Boy, and 
Veneranda Porta. 

The first of these* lep-ends is that of a sausao;e- 
maker who flourished in Venice some centuries ago, 
and who improved the quality of the broth which the 
luganegJieri make of their scraps and sell to i\\Q gon- 
doliers, by cutting up into it now and then a child of 
some neighbor. He was finally detected by a gon- 
dolier who discovered a little finger in his broth, and 
being brought to justice, w^as dragged through the 
city at the heels of a wild horse. This most uncom- 
fortable character appears to be the first hero in 
the romance of the gondoliers, and he certainly de- 
serves to rank with that long line of imaginary per- 
sonages who have made childhood so wretched and 
tractable. The second is the Innocent Baker-Boy 
already named, who was put to death on suspicion of 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 331 

having murdered a noble, because in the dead man's 
heart was found a dagger fitting a sheath which the 
baker had picked up in the street, on the morning of 
the murder, and kept in his possession. Many years 
afterwards, a malefactor who died in Padua con- 
fessed the murder, and thereupon two lamps were 
lighted before a shrine *in the southern fagade of St. 
Mark's Church, — one for the murdered nobleman's 
soul, and the other for that of the innocent boy. 
Such is the gondoliers' story, and the lamps still burn 
every night before the shrine from dark till dawn, in 
witness of its truth. The fact of the murder and its 
guiltless expiation is an incident of Venetian history, 
and it is said that the Council of the Ten never pro- 
nounced a sentence of death thereafter, till they had 
been solemnly warned by one of their number with 
" Ricordatevi del povero Fornaretto ! " (Remember 
the poor Baker-Boy!) The poet Dall 'Ongaro has 
woven the story into a beautiful and touching trag- 
edy ; but I believe the poet is still to be born who 
shall take from the gondoliers their Veneranda Porta, 
and place her historic figure in dramatic literature. 
Veneranda Porta was a lady of the days of the Re- 
public, between whom and her husband existed an 
incompatibility. This was increased by the course 
of Signora Porta in taking a lover, and it at last led 
to the assassination of the husband by the paramours. 
The head of the murdered man was found in one of 
the canals, and being exposed, as the old custom 
was, upon the granite pedestal at the corner of St. 
Mark's Church, it was recognized by his brother, 



332 VENETIAN LIFE. 

who found among the papers on which the long hair 
was curled fragments of a letter he had written to 
the deceased. The crime was traced to the para- 
mours, and being brought before the Ten, they were 
both condemned to be hanged between the columns 
of the Piazzetta. The gondoliers relate that when 
the sentence was pronounced, Veneranda said to the 
Chief of the Ten, "• But as for me this sentence will 
never be carried out. You cannot hang a woman. 
Consider the impropriety!" The Venetian rulers 
were wise men in their generation, and far from 
being balked by this question of delicacy, the Chief 
replied, solving it, " My dear, you shall be hanged In 
my breeches." 

It is very coarse salt which keeps one of these 
stories ; another is remembered because it concerns 
one of the people ; and another for its abomination 
and horror. The incidents of Venetian history which 
take the fancy and touch the sensibility of the world 
seem hardly known to the gondoliers, the most intel- 
ligent and quick-witted of the populace, and them- 
selves the very stuff* that some romantic dreams of 
Venice are made of. However sad the fact, it is un- 
deniable that the stories of the sausage-maker whose 
broth was flavored with murder, and the baker-boy 
who suffered guiltlessly, and that savage jest at the 
expense of the murderess, interest these people more 
than the high-well-born sorrows of the Foscari, the 
tragic fate of Carmagnola, or the story of Falier, — 
which last they know partly, however, because of the 
scandal about Falier's wife. Yet after all, though the 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 333 

gondoliers are not the gondoliers of imaginative liter- 
ature, they have qualities which recommended them 
to my liking, and I look back upon my acquaintance 
with two or three of them in a very friendly spirit. 
Compared with the truculent hackmen, who prey 
upon the traveling public in all other cities of the 
civihzed world, they are eminently intelligent and 
amiable. Rogues they are, of course, for small dis- 
honesties are the breath in the nostrils of common 
carriers by land or water, everywhere ; but the 
trickery of the gondoliers is so good-natured and 
simple that it can hardly offend. A very ordinary 
jocular sagacity defeats their profoundest purposes of 
swindling, and no one enjoys their exposure half so 
much as themselves, while a faint prospect of future 
employment purifies them of every trait of dis- 
honesty. I had only one troublesome experience 
with them, and that was in the case of the old gon- 
dolier who taught me to row. He, when I had no 
longer need of his services, plunged into drunken- 
ness, and came and dismissed me one day with every 
mark of ignominy. But he afterwards forgave me, 
and saluted me kindly when we met. 

The immediate goal of every gondolier's ambition 
is to serve, no matter for how short a time, an 
Inglese, by which generic title nearly all foreigners 
except Germans are known to him. The Inglese, 
whether he be English or American, is apt to make 
the tour of the whole city in a gondola, and to give 
handsome drink money at the end, whereas your 
Tedesco frugally walks to every place accessible by 



834 VENETIAN LIFE. 

land, or when, in a party of six or eight, he takes a 
gondola, plants himself upon the letter of the tariff, 
and will give no more than the rate fixed by law. 
The gondolier is therefore flowingly polite to the 
Inglese, and he is even civil to the Tedesco ; but he 
is not at all bound in courtesy to that provincial 
Italian who comes from the country to Venice, bar- 
gains furiously for his boat, and commonly pays 
under the tariff. The Venetian who does not him- 
self keep a gondola seldom hires one, and even on 
this rare occasion makes no lavish demand such as 
" How much do you want for taking me to the rail- 
way station ? " Lest the fervid imagination of the 
gondolier rise to zwanzigers and florins, and a tedious 
dispute ensue, he asks : '' How many centissimi do 
you want ? " and the contract is made for a number 
of soldi. 

The number of private gondolas owned in Venice 
is not very great. The custom is rather to hire a 
gondolier with his boat. The exclusive use of the 
gondola is thus secured, and the gondolier gives his 
services as a domestic when off his special duty. He 
waits at table, goes marketing, takes the children to 
school, and serves the ladies as footman, for five 
francs a day, himself paying the proprietor of the 
gondola about a franc daily for the boat. In former 
times, when Venice was rich and prosperous, many 
noble families kept six or seven gondolas ; and what 
with this service, and the numerous gala-days of the 
Republic, when the whole city took boat for the Lido, 
or the Giudecca, or Murano, and the gondoliers were 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 335 

allowed to exact any pay they could, they were a 
numerous and prosperous class. But these times 
have passed from Venice forever, and though the 
gondoliers are still, counting the boatmen of the 
Giudecca and Lido, some thousands in number, there 
are comparatively few young men among them, and 
their gains are meagre. 

In the little city of Venice, where the dialect spoken 
at Canareggio or Castello is a different tongue from 
that heard under the Procuratie of St. Mark's Place, 
the boatmen of the several quarters of the city of 
course vary greatly in character and appearance ; 
and the gondolier who lounges at the base of the 
columns of the Piazzetta, and airily invites the Inglesi 
to tours of the Grand Canal, is of quite a different 
type from the weather-beaten harcaiuolo, who croaks 
" Barca ! " at the promenaders on the Zattere. But 
all, as I say, are simple and harmless enough, and 
however loudly they quarrel among themselves, they 
never pass from the defamation of their female rela- 
tives to blows. As for the game of knives, as it is 
said to be played at Naples, and as About describes 
it at Rome, I doubt if it is much known to the popu- 
lace of Venice. Only the doctors let blood there — 
though from their lancets it flows pretty freely and 
constantly. 

It is true that the gondolier loves best of every- 
thing a clamorous quarrel, carried on with the canal 
between him and his antagonist ; but next to this, 
he loves to spend his leisure at the ferry in talking 
of eating and of money, and he does not differ from 



336 VENETIAN LIFE. 

many of his fellow-citizens in choice of topics. I 
have seldom caught a casual expression from passers 
in tlie streets of Venice which did not relate in some 
way to gold Napoleons, zwanzigers, florins, or soldi, 
or else to wine and polenta. I note this trait in the 
Venetians, w^hich Goldoni observed in the Milanese a 
hundred years ago, and which I incline to believe is 
common to all Italians. The gondoliers talk a great 
deal in figure and hyperbole, and their jocose chaff 
is quite inscrutable even to some classes of Venetians. 
With foreigners, to whom the silence and easy prog- 
ress of the gondola gives them the opportunity to 
talk, they are fond of using a word or two of French. 
They are quick at repartee, and have a clever answer 
ready for most occasions. I was one day bargaining 
for a boat to the Lido, whither I refused to be taken 
in a shabby gondola, or at a rate higher than seventy- 
five soldi for the trip. At last the patience of the 
gondoliers was exhausted, and one of them called 
out, " Somebody fetch the Bucintoro, and take this 
gentleman to the Lido for seventy-five soldi ! " (The 
Bucintoro being the magnificent barge in which the 
Doge w^ent to w^ed the Adriatic.) 

The skill with which the 2:ondoliers manao;e their 
graceful 'craft is always admired by strangers, and is 
certainly remarkable. The gondola is very long and 
slender, and rises high from the water at either end. 
Both bow and stern are sharp, the former being 
ornamented with that deeply serrated blade of steel, 
which it is the pride of the gondolier to keep bright 
as silver, and the poop having a small platform, not 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 337 

far behind the cabin, on which he stands when ho 
rows. The danger of colhsion has always obhged 
Venetian boatmen to face the bow, and the stroke 
with the oar (for the gondolier uses only a single oar) 
is made by pushing, and not by pulling. No small 
degree of art (as I learnt from experience) is thus 
required to keep the gondola's head straight, — all 
the strokes being made on one side, — and the scull- 
ing return of the oar-blade, preparatory for each new 
stroke, is extremely difficult to effect. Under the 
hands of the gondolier, however, the gondola seems 
a living thing, full of grace and winning movement. 
The wood-work of the little cabin is elaborately 
carved, and it is usually furnished with mirrors and 
seats luxuriously cushioned. The sensation of the 
gondola's progress, felt by the occupant of the cabin, 
as he falls back upon these cushions, may be described, 
to the female apprehension at least, as " too divine." 
The cabin is removable at pleasure, and is generally 
taken off* and replaced by awnings in summer. But 
in the evening, when the fair Venetians go out in 
their gondolas to take the air, even this awning is 
dispensed with, and the long slender boat glides 
darkly down the Grand Canal, bearing its dazzling 
freight of w^hite tulle^ pale-faced, black-eyed beauty, 
and flashing jewels, in full view. 

As for the singing of the gondoliers, they are the 
only class of Venetians who have not good voices, 
and I am scarcely inclined to regret the silence which 
long ago fell upon them. I am quite satisfied with 
the peculiar note of warning which they utter as they 

22 



838 VENETIAN LIFE. 

approach the corner of a canal, and which meaning 

simply, " To the Right," or " To the Left," is the 

most pathetic and melancholy sound in the world. 

If, putting aside my own' comfort, I have sometimes 

"wished for the sake of a dear, sentimental old friend 

at home, who loves such idle illusions with an ardor 

unbecoming his years, that I might hear the voice 

" of Adria's gondolier, 
By distance mellowed, o'er the waters sweep," 

I must still confess that I never did hear it under 
similar circumstances, except in conversation across 
half a mile of lagoon, when, as usual, the burden of 
the lay was polenta or soldi. 

A recent Venetian writer, describing the charac- 
ter of the lower classes of Venice, says: ''No one 
can deny that our populace is loquacious and quick- 
witted ; but, on the other hand, no one can deny 
that it is regardless of improvement. Venice, a city 
exceptional in its construction, its customs, and its 
habits, has also an exceptional populace. It still 
feels, although sixty-eight years have passed, the 
influence of the system of the fallen Republic, of 
that oligarchic government, which, affording almost 
every day some amusement to the people, left them 
no time to think of their offended rights. . . . Since 
1859 Venice has resembled a sepulchre of the living, 
— squalor and beggary gaining ground with each day, 
and commerce, wdth few exceptions, converted intoi 
monopoly ; yet the populace remains attached to its 
old habits, and will have its pleasure. If the earn- 
/ings are little, what then ? Must one die of ennui ' 



VENETIAN TEAITS AND CHARACTERS. 339 

The cafFS is depopulated : not so the drinking-house. 
The last day before the drawing of the lottery, the 
offices are thronged with fathers and mothers of 
families, who stint their children of bread to buy 
dearly a few hours of golden illusion. . . . At the 
worst, there is the Monte di Pieta, as a last resort.'' 

It is true, as this writer says, that the pleasure- 
loving populace still looks back fondly to the old Re- 
publican times of feasting and holidays ; but there is 
certainly no truth any more in the old idea that any 
part of Italy is a place where people may be " idle 
with impunity," or make amusement the serious 
business of life. I can remember that the book from 
which I received my first impressions of geography 
was illuminated with a picture professing to represent 
Italian customs. The spirit of inquiry had long before 
caused me to doubt the exact fidelity of this represen- 
tation ; but it cost me a pang to learn that the picture 
was utterly delusive. It has been no part of my ex- 
perience in Venice to see an Italian sitting upon the 
ground, and strumming the guitar, while two gayly 
dressed peasants danced to the music. Indeed, the 
indolence of Venetians is listless and silent, not play- 
ful or joyous ; and as I learned to know their life 
more intimately, I came to understand that in many 
cases they are idle from despair of finding work, and 
that indolence is as much their fate as their fault. 
Any diligence of theirs is surprising to us of northern 
and free lands, because their climate subdues and 
enervates us, and because we can see before them no 
career open to intelligent industry. With the poorest, 



340 VENETIAN LIFE. 

work is necessarily a hand-to-hand struggle against 
hunger ; with those who would not absolutely starve 
without it, work is an inexplicable passion. 

Partly because the ways of these people are so 
childlike and simple in many things, and partly from 
one's own swindling tendency to take one's self in (a 
tendency really fatal to all sincerity of judgment, and 
incalculably mischievous to such downfallen peoples 
as have felt the baleful effects of the world's senti- 
mental, impotent sympathy), there is something pa- 
thetic in the patient content with which Italians 
work. They have naturally so large a capacity for 
enjoyment, that the degree of self-denial involved in 
labor seems exorbitant, and one feels that these chil- 
dren, so loved of Nature, and so gifted by her, are 
harshly dealt with by their stepmother Circumstance. 
No doubt there ought to be truth in the silly old 
picture, if there is none, and I would willingly make- 
believe to credit it, if I could. I am glad that they 
at least work in old-world, awkward, picturesque 
ways, and not in commonplace, handy, modern fash- 
ion. Neither the habits nor the implements of la- 
bor are changed since the progress of the Republic 
ceased, and her heart began to die within her. AH 
sorts of mechanics' tools are clumsy and inconven- 
ient : the turner's lathe moves by broken impulses ; 
door-hinges are made to order, and lift the door from 
the ground as it opens upon them ; all nails and tacks 
are hand-made ; window-sashes are contrived to be 
glazed without putty, and the panes are put in from 
the top, so that to repair a broken glass the whole 



i 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 841 

s^sh is taken apart ; cooking-stoves are unknown to 
the native cooks, who work at an open fire, with 
crane and danghng pot-hooks ; furniture is put to- 
gether with wooden pegs instead of screws ; you do 
not buy a door-lock at a hardware store, — you get a 
fabhro to make it, and he comes with a leathern 
satchel full of tools to fit and finish it on the door. 
The wheelbarrow of this civilization is peculiarly 
wonderful in construction, with a prodigious wooden 
wheel, and a ponderous, incapable body. The canals 
are dredged with scoops mounted on long poles, and 
manned each by three or four Chiozzotti. There 
never was a pile-driving machine known in Venice ; 
nor a steam-tug in all the channels of the lagoons, 
through which the largest craft are towed to and 
from the ports by row-boats. In the model of the 
sea-going vessels there has apparently been little 
change from the first. Yet in spite of all this 
backwardness in invention, the city is full of beau- 
tiful workmanship in every branch of artificing, 
and the Venetians are still the best sailors in the 
Adriatic. 

I do not offer the idea as a contribution to statis- 
tics, but it seems to me that the most active branch 
of industry in Venice is plucking fowls. In summer 
the people all work on their thresholds, and in their 
windows, and as nearly out of doors as the narrowness 
of the streets will let them, — and it is hard to pass 
through any part of the city without coming to a 
poulterer's shop, in the door of which inevitably sits 
a boy, tugging at the plumage of some wretched bird. 



842 VENETIAN LIFE. 

He is seldom to be seen except in that crisis of pluck- 
ing when he seems to have all but finished ; yet he 
seems never to accomplish the fact perfectly. Per- 
haps it is part of his hard fate that the feathers 
shall grow again under his hand as fast as he plucks 
them away : at the restaurants, I know, the quantity 
of plumage one devours in consuming roast chicken 
is surprising — at first. The birds are always very 
lean, too, and have but a languid and weary look, in 
spite of the ardent manner in which the boy clasps 
them while at work. It may be that the Venetians 
do not like fat poultry. Their turkeys, especially, 
are of that emaciation which is attributed among 
ourselves only to the turkey of Job ; and as for the 
geese and ducks, they can only interest anatomists. 
It is as if the long ages of incursion and oppression 
which have impoverished and devastated Italy had 
at last taken effect upon the poultry, and made it as 
poor as the population. 

I do not want to give too exclusive an impression 
of Venetian industry, however, for now I remember 
the Venetian lasagnoni^ whom I never saw doing 
any thing, and who certainly abound in respectable 
numbers. 

The lasagnone is a loafer, as an Italian can be a 
loafer, without the admixture of ruffianism, which 
blemishes most loafers of northern race. He may be 
quite worthless, and even impertinent, but he cannot 
be a rowdy, — that pleasing blossom on the nose 
of our fast, high-fed, thick-blooded civilization. In 
Venice he must not be confounded with other loiter- 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 343 

ers at the cafFS ; not with the natty people who talk 
politics interminably over little cups of black coffee; 
not with those old habitues, who sit forever under the 
Procuratie, their hands folded upon the tops of their 
sticks, and staring at the ladies who pass with a curi- 
ous steadfastness and knowing skepticism of gaze, not 
pleasing in the dim eyes of age ; certainly, the last 
persons who bear any likeness to the lasagnone are 
the Germans, with their honest, heavy faces comically 
anglicized by leg-of-mutton whiskers. The truth is, 
the lasagnone does not flourish in the best caff^ ; he 
comes to perfection in cheaper resorts, for he is com- 
monly not rich. It often happens that a glass of 
water, flavored with a little anisette, is the order over 
which he sits a whole evening. He knows the waiter 
intimately, and does not call him " Shop ! " (Bot- 
tega,) as less familiar people do, but Gigi, or Beppi, 
as the waiter is pretty sure to be named. ^' Be- 
hold ! " he says, when the servant places his mod- 
est drink before him, " who is that loveliest blonde 
there ? " Or to his fellow-lasagnone : '^ She regards 
me! I have broken her the heart!" This is his 
sole business and mission, the cruel lasagnone — to 
break ladies the heart. He spares no condition, — 
neither rank nor wealth is any defense against him. 
I often wonder what is in that note he continually 
shows to his friend. The confession of some broken 
heart, I think. When he has folded it, and put it 
away, he chuckles "J.A, cava!''' and sucks at his 
long, slender Virginia cigar. It is unlighted, for fire 
I never see him read the papers, 



344 VENETIAN LIFE. 

— neither the Itahan papers nor the Parisian jour 
nals, though if he can get '^ Gahgnani " he is glad, 
and he hkes to pretend to a knowledge of English, 
uttering upon occasion, with great relish, such dis- 
tinctively English words as " Yes " and " Not," and 
to the waiter, '' A-little-fire-if-you-please." He sits 
very late in the caffd, and he touches his hat — his 
curly French hat — to the company as he goes out 
with a mild swagger, his cane held lightly in his left 
hand, his coat cut snugly to show his hips, and gen- 
teelly swaying with the motion of his body. He is a 
dandy, of course, — all Italians are dandies, — but 
his vanity is perfectly harmless, and his heart is not 
bad. He would go half an hour out of his way to 
put you in the direction of the Piazza. A little thing 
can make him happy, — to stand in the pit at the opera, 
and gaze at the ladies in the lower boxes — to attend 
the Marionette, or the Malibran Theatre, and imperil 
the peace of pretty seamstresses and contadinas — to 
stand at the church doors and ogle the fair saints as 
they pass out. Go, harmless lasagnone, to thy lodg- 
ing in some mysterious height, and break hearts if 
thou wilt. They ar'e quickly mended. 

Of other vagabonds in Venice, if I had my choice, 
I think I must select a certain ruffian who deals in 
dog-flesh, as the nearest my ideal of what a vagabond 
should be in all respects. He stands habitually under 
the Old Procuratie, beside a basket of small puppies 
in that snuffling and quivering state which appears 
to be the favorite condition of very young dogs, and 
occupies himself in conversation with an adjacent 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 345 

dealer in grapes and peaches, or sometimes fastid- 
iously engages in trimming the hair upon the closely 
shaven bodies of the dogs ; for in Venice it is the 
ambition of every dog to look as much hke the Lion 
of St. Mark as the nature of the case will permit. 
My vagabond at times makes expeditions to the 
groups of travelers always seated in summer before 
the Caffe Florian, appearing at such times with a 
very small puppy, — neatly poised upon the palm of 
his hand, and winking pensively, — which he adver- 
tises to the company as a '' Beautiful Beast," or a 
" Lovely Babe," according to the inspiration of his 
light and pleasant fancy. I think the latter term is 
used generally as a means of ingratiation with the 
ladies, to whom my vagabond always shows a de- 
meanor of agreeable gallantry. I never saw him sell 
any of these dogs, nor ever in the least cast down by 
his failure to do so. His air is grave, but not severe ; 
there is even, at times, a certain playfulness in his 
manner, possibly attributable to sciampagnin. His 
curling black locks, together with his velveteen jacket 
and pantaloons, are oiled and glossy, and his beard 
is cut in the French-imperial mode. His personal 
presence is unwholesome, and it is chiefly his moral 
perfection as a vagabond that makes him fascinating. 
One is so confident, however, of his fitness for his 
position and business, and of his entire contentment 
with it, that it is impossible not to exult in him. 

He is not without self-respect. I doubt, it would 
be hard to find any Venetian of any vocation, how- 
ever base, who forgets that he too is a man and a 



346 VENETIAN LIFE. 

brother. There is enough servility in the language, — 
it is the fashion of the Italian tongue, with its Tu for 
inferiors, Voi for intimates and friendly equals, and 
Lei for superiors, — but in the manner there is none, 
and there is a sense of equality in the ordinary 
intercourse of the Venetians, at once apparent to 
foreigners. 

All ranks are orderly; the spirit of aggression 
seems not to exist among them, and the very boys 
and dogs in ^ Venice are so well-behaved, that I have 
never seen the slightest disposition in them to quarrel. 
Of course, it is of the street-boy — the hiriccliino^ the 
boy in his natural, unreclaimed state — that I speak. 
This state is here, in winter, marked by a clouded 
countenance, bare head, tatters, and wooden-soled 
shoes open at the heels ; in summer by a preter- 
natural purity of person, by abandon to the amphib- 
ious pleasure of leaping off the bridges into the canals, 
and by an insatiable appetite for polenta, fried min- 
nows, and water-melons. 

When one of these boys takes to beggary, as a 
great many of them do, out of a spirit of adventure 
and wish to pass the time, he carries out the enter- 
prise with splendid daring. A favorite artifice is to 
approach Charity with a slice of polenta in one hand, 
and, with the other extended, implore a soldo to buy 
cheese to eat with the polenta. The street-boys also 
often perform the duties of the gransieri^ who draw 
your gondola to shore, and keep it firm with a hook. 
To this order of beggar I usually gave ; but one day 
at the railway station I had no soldi, and as I did not 



YENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 347 

Wish to render my friend discontented with future alms 
by giving silver, I deliberately apologized, praying 
him to excuse me, and promising him for another 
time. I cannot forget the lofty courtesy with w^hich 
he returned, — " S'accomodi pur^ Signor ! " They 
have sometimes a sense of humor, these poor swind- 
lers, and can enjoy the exposure of their own enor- 
mities. An amiable rogue drew our gondola to land 
one evening when we went too late to see the church 
of San Gioro-io Mawiore. The sacristan made us 
free of a perfectly dark church, and we rewarded 
him as if it had been noonday. On our return to 
the gondola, the same beggar w^hom we had just 
feed held out his hat for another alms. " But we 
have just paid you," w^e cried in an agony of grief 
and desperation. '' Si^ signoril ^^ he admitted with 
an air of argument, '' e vero. Ma^ la ehiesa ! " 
(Yes, gentlemen, it is true. But the church !) he 
added with confidential insinuation, and a patronizing 
wave of the hand toward the edifice, as if he had been 
San Giorgio himself, and held the church as a source 
of revenue. This was too much, and w^e laughed 
him to scorn ; at which, beholding the amusing 
abomination of his conduct, he himself joined in our 
laugh with a cheerfulness that won our hearts. 

Beggary is attended by no disgrace in Italy, and 
it therefore comes that no mendicant is without a 
proper degree of the self-respect common to all 
classes. Indeed, the habit of taking gifts of money 
is so general and shameless that the street beggars 
must be diffident souls indeed if they hesitated to ask 



348 VENETIAN LIFE. 

for it. A perfectly well-dressed and well-mannered 
man will take ten soldi from you for a trifling service, 
and not consider himself in the least abased. The 
detestable custom of largess, instead of wages, still 
obtains in so great degree in Venice that a physician, 
when asked for his account, replies : " What you 
please to give." Knowing these customs, I hope I 
have never acted discourteously to the street beggars 
of Venice even when I gave them nothing, and I 
know that only one of them ever so far forgot himself 
as to curse me for not giving. Him, however, I think 
to have been out of his right mind at the time. 

There were two mad beggars in the parish of San 
Stefano, whom I should be sorry to leave unmeniioned 
here. One, who presided chiefly over the Campo 
San Stefano, professed to be also a facchino, but I 
never saw him employed, except in addressing select 
circles of idlers whom a brawling noise always draws 
together in Venice. He had been a soldier, and he 
sometimes put himself at the head of a file of Croats 
passing through the campo, and gave them the word 
of command, to the great amusement of those swarthy 
barbarians. He was a good deal in drink, and when 
in this state was proud to go before any ladies who 
might be passing, and clear away the boys and idlers, 
to make room for them. When not occupied in any 
of these ways, he commonly slept in the arcades of 
the old convent. 

But the mad beggar of Campo Sant' Angelo seemed 
to have a finer sense of what became him as a mad- 
man and a beggar, and never made himself obnoxious 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 349 

by his noise. He was, in fact, very fat and amiable, 
and in the summer lay asleep, for the most part, at 
a certain street corner which belonged to him. When 
awake he was a man of extremely complaisant pres- 
ence, and suffered no lady to go by without a compli- 
ment to her complexion, her blond hair, or her beau- 
tiful eyes, whichever it might be. He got money 
for these attentions, and people paid him for any sort 
of witticism. One day he said to the richest young 
dandy of the city, — ''Pah! you stomach me with 
your perfumes and fine airs ; " for which he received 
half a florin. His remarks to gentlemen had usually 
this sarcastic flavor. I am sorry to say that so excel- 
lent a madman was often drunk and unable to fulfill 
his duties to society. 

There are, of course, laws against mendicancy in 
Venice, and they are, of course, never enforced. 
Beggars abound everywhere, and nobody molests 
them. There was long a troop of weird sisters in 
Campo San Stefano, who picked up a livelihood from 
the foreigners passing to and from the Academy of 
Fine Arts. They addressed people with the title of 
Count, and no doubt gained something by this sort 
of heraldry, though there are counts in Venice 
almost as poor as themselves, and titles are not 
distinctions. The Venetian seldom gives to beg- 
gars ; he says deliberately, " iVo ^o " (I have 
nothing), or " Quando ritornero " (when I return), 
and never comes back that way. I noticed that 
professional hunger and cold took this sort of denial 
very patiently, as they did every other ; but I confess 



850 VENETIAN LIFE. 

I had never the heart to practice it. In my walks 
to the Pubhc Gardens there was a venerable old man, 
with the beard and bearing of a patriarch, whom I 
encountered on the last bridge of the Riva, and who 
there asked alms of me. When I gave him a soldo, 
he returned me a blessing which I would be ashamed 
to take in the United States for half a dollar ; and 
when the soldo was in some inaccessible pocket, and 
I begged him to await my coming back, he said 
sweetly, — " Very well, Signor, I will be here." And 
I must say, to his credit, that he never broke his 
promise, nor suffered me, for shame's sake, to break 
mine. He was quite a treasure to me in this respect, 
and assisted me to form habits of punctuality. 

That exuberance of manner which one notes, 
the first thing, in his intercourse with Venetians, 
characterizes all classes, but is most excessive and 
relishing in the poor. There is a vast deal of cere- 
mony with every order, and one hardly knows what 
to do with the numbers of compliments it is necessary 
to respond to. A Venetian does not come to see 
you, he comes to revere you ; he not only asks if 
you be well when he meets you, but he bids you 
remain well at parting, and desires you to salute for 
him all common friends ; he reverences you at leave- 
taking ; he will sometimes consent to incommode 
you with a visit ; he will relieve you of the disturb- 
ance when he rises to go. All spontaneous wishes 
which must, with us, take original forms, for lack of 
the complimentary phrase, are formally expressed by 
him, — good appetite to you, when you go to dinner ; 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 351 

much enjoyment, when you go to the theatre ; a 
pleasant walk, if you meet in promenade. He is 
your servant at meeting and parting ; he begs to be 
commanded when he has misunderstood you. But 
courtesy takes its highest flights, as I hinted, from 
the poorest company. Acquaintances of this sort, 
when not on the Cid ciappa footing, or that of the 
familiar thee and thou, always address each other 
in Lei (lordship), or Elo^ as the Venetians have 
it ; and their compliment - making at encounter 
and separation is endless : I salute you ! Remain 
well ! Master ! Mistress ! {Paron ! parona .') being 
repeated as long as the polite persons are within 
hearing. 

One day, as we passed through the crowded 
Merceria, an old Venetian friend of mine, who trod 
upon the dress of a young person before us, called 
out, '^ Scusate, hella giovane ! " (Pardon, beautiful 
girl !) She was not so fair nor so young as I have 
seen women ; but she half turned her face with a 
forgiving smile, and seemed pleased with the accident 
that had won her the amiable apology. The waiter 
of the caffS frequented by the people, says to the 
ladies for whom he places seats, — " Take this place, 
beautiful blonde ; " or, " Sit here, lovely brunette," 
as it happens. 

A Venetian who enters or leaves any place of 
public resort touches his hat to the company, and 
one day at the restaurant some ladies, who had been 
dining there, said '* Gomplimenti ! " on going out, 
with a grace that went near to make the beefsteak 



352 , VENETIAN LIFE. 

tender. It is this uncostly gentleness of bearing 
which gives a winning impression of the whole 
people, whatever selfishness or real discourtesy lie 
beneath it. At home it sometimes seems that we 
are in such haste to live and be done with it, we 
have no time to be polite. Or is popular politeness 
merely a vice of servile peoples ? And is it altogether 
better to be rude ? I wish it were not. If you are 
lost in his city (and you are pretty sure to be lost 
there, continually), a Venetian will go with you 
wherever you wish. And he will do this amiable 
little service out of what one may say old civilization 
has established in place of goodness of heart, but 
which is perhaps not so different from it. 

You hear people in the streets bless each other in 
the most dramatic fashion. I once caught these 
parting words between an old man and a young girl ; 

Griovanetta. Revered sir ! (^Patron riverito /) 

Veechio. (With that peculiar backward wave and 
beneficent wag of the hand, only possible to Italians.) 
Blessed child ! (Benedeita /) 

It was in a crowd, but no one turned round at 
the utterance of terms which Anglo-Saxons would 
scarcely use in their most emotional moments. The 
old gentleman who sells boxes for the theatre in the 
Old Procuratie always gave me his benediction when 
I took a box. 

There is equal exuberance of invective, and I have 
heard many fine maledictions on the Venetian streets, 
but I recollect none more elaborate than that of a 
gondolier who, after listening peacefully to a quarrel 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 353 

between two other boatmen, suddenly took part 
against one of them, and saluted him with, — " Ah ! 
baptized son of a dog ! And if I had been present 
at thy baptism, I would have dashed thy brains out 
against the baptismal font ! " 

All the theatrical forms of passion were visible 
in a scene I witnessed in a little street near San 
Samuele, where I found the neighborhood assembled 
at doors and w^indows in honor of a wordy battle 
between two poor women. One of these had been 
forced in-doors by her prudent husband, and the other 
upbraided her across the marital barrier. The as- 
sailant was washing, and twenty times she left her 
tub to revile the besieged, who thrust her long arms 
out over those of her husband, and turned each re- 
proach back upon her who uttered it, thus : — 

Assailant Beast! 

Besieged, Thou ! 

A. Fool ! 

B. Thou! 

A. Liar! 

B. Thou! 

B via in seguito ! At last the assailant, beating her 
breast with both hands, and tempestuously swaying 
her person back and forth, wreaked her scorn in one 
w^ild outburst of vituperation, and returned finally to 
her tub, wisely saying, on the purple verge of asphyx- 
iation, " 0, non discorro piu con gente^ 

I returned half an hour later, and she was laugh- 
ing and playing sweetly with her babe. 

It suits the passionate nature of the Italians to have 

23 



864 VENETIAN LIFE. 

incredible ado about buying and selling, and a day's 
shopping is a sort of campaign, from which the shop- 
per returns plundered and discomfited, or laden with 
the spoil of vanquished shopmen. 

The embattled commercial transaction is conducted 
in this wise : 

The shopper enters, and prices a given article. 
The shopman names a sum of which only the fervid 
imagination of the South could conceive as corre- 
sponding to the value of the goods. 

The purchaser instantly starts back with a wail 
of horror and indignation, and the shopman throws 
himself forward over the counter with a protest that, 
far from being dear, the article is ruinously cheap at 
the price stated, though they may nevertheless agree 
for something less. 

What, then, is the very most ultimate price ? 

Properly, the very most ultimate price is so much. 
(Say, the smallest trifle under the price first asked.) 

The purchaser moves toward the door. He 
comes back, and offers one third of the very most 
ultimate price. 

The shopman, w^ith a gentle desperation, declares 
that the thing cost him as much. He cannot really 
take the offer. He regrets, but he cannot. That 
the gentleman would say something more ! So 
much — for example. That he regard the stuff, its 
quality, fashion, beauty. 

The gentleman laughs him to scorn. Ah, heigh ! 
and, coming forward, he picks up the article and 
reviles it. Out of the mode, old, fragile, ugly of its 
kind. 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 355 

The shopman defends his wares. There is not 
such quantity and quahty elsewhere in Venice. But 
if the gentleman will give even so much (still some- 
thing preposterous), he may have it, though truly its 
sale for that money is utter ruin. 

The shopper walks straight to the door. The shop- 
man calls him back from the threshold, or sends his 
boy to call him back from the street. 

Let him accommodate himself — which is to say, 
take the thing at his own price. 

He takes it. 

The shopman says cheerfully, " Servo suo ! " 

The purchaser responds, " Bon di ! Patron ! " 
(Good day ! my Master !) 

Thus, as I said, every bargain is a battle, and 
every purchase a triumph or a defeat. The whole 
thing is understood ; the opposing forces know per- 
fectly well all that is to be done beforehand, and 
retire after the contest, like the captured knights in 
'' Morgante Maggiore^^^ "calm as oil," — however 
furious and deadly their struggle may have appeared 
to strangers. 

Foreigners soon discern, however, that there is no 
bloodshed in such encounters, and enter into them 
with a zeal as great as that of natives, though with 
less skill. I knew one American who prided himself 
on such matters, and who haughtily closed a certain 
bargain without words, as he called it. The shopman 
oifered several articles, for which he demanded prices 
amounting in all to ninety-three francs. His wary 
customer rapidly computed the total and repHedj, 



856 VENETIAN LIFE. 

" Without words, now, I '11 give you a hundred francs 
for the lot." With a pensive elevation of the eye- 
brows, and a reluctant shrug of the shoulders, the 
shopman suffered him to take them. 

Your Venetian is simpatico^ if he is any thing. 
He is always ready to feel and to express the deepest 
concern, and I rather think he likes to have his sen- 
sibilities appealed to, as a pleasant and healthful 
exercise for them. His sympathy begins at home, 
and he generously pities himself as the victim of a 
combination of misfortunes, which leave him citizen 
of a country without liberty, without commerce, 
without money, without hope. He next pities his 
fellow-citizens, who are as desperately situated as 
himself. Then he pities the degradation, corruption, 
and despair into which the city has fallen. And I 
think his compassion is the most hopeless thing in 
his character. That alone is touched ; that alone is 
moved ; and when its impulse ceases he and every 
thing about him remain just as before. 

With the poor, this sensibility is amusingly mis- 
chievous. They never speak of one of their own 
class without adding some such ejaculation as " Poor 
fellow ! " or, '' Poor little creature ! " They pity all 
wretchedness, no matter from what cause, and the 
greatest rogue has their compassion when under a 
cloud. It is all but impossible to punish thieves in 
Venice, where they are very bold and numerous • 
for the police are too much occupied with political 
surveillance to give due attention to mere cutpurses 
and housebreakers, and even when they make an 



VENETIAN TRAITS AND CHARACTERS. 357 

arrest, people can hardly be got to bear witness 
against their unhappy prisoner. Povareto anea lu! 
There is no work and no money; people must do 
something ; so they steal. Ci vuol pazienza ! Bear 
witness against an ill-fated fellow-sufferer ? God for- 
bid ! Stop a thief? I think a burglar might run 
from Rialto to San Marco, and not one compassion- 
ate soul in the Merceria would do aught to arrest 
him — povareto! Thieves came to the house of a 
friend of mine at noonday, when his servant was out. 
They tied their boat to his landing, entered his house, 
filled their boat with plunder from it, and rowed out 
into the canal. The neighbors on the floor above 
saw them, and cried '' Thieves! thieves ! " It was 
in the most frequented part of the Grand Canal, 
where scores of boats passed and repassed ; but no 
one molested the thieves, and these povareti escaped 
with their booty.* 

One night, in a little street through which we 
passed to our ferry, there came a wild rush before us, 
of a woman screaming for help, and pursued by her 
husband with a knife in his hand ; their children, 
shrieking piteously, came after them. The street 
w^as crowded with people and soldiers, but no one 

^ The rogues, it must be confessed, are often very polite. This 
same friend of mine one day found a man in the act of getting 
down into a boat with his favorite singing bird in its cage. " "What 
are you doing with that bird ? " he thought himself authorized to 
inquire. The thief looked about him a moment, and perceiving 
himself detected, handed back the cage with a cool " La scusi ! ** 
(" Beg pardon! '') as if its removal had been a trifling inadvert- 
ence. 



358 VENETIAN LIFE. 

put out his hand ; and the man presently overtook 
his wife and stabbed her in the back. We only 
knew of the rush, but what it all meant we could 
not tell, till we saw the woman bleeding from the 
stab, which, happily, was slight. Inquiry of the by- 
standers developed the facts, but, singularly enough, 
scarcely a word of pity. It was entirely a family 
affair, it seemed ;, the man, poor little fellow, had a 
mistress, and his wife had maddened him with re- 
proaches. Come si fa? He had to stab her. The 
woman's case was not one that appealed to popular 
compassion, and the only words of pity for her which 
I heard were expressed by the wife of a fruiterer, 
whom her husband angrily silenced. 



CHAPTER XXL 

SOCIETY. 

It was natural that the Venetians, whose State lay 
upon the borders of the Greek Empire, and whose 
greatest commerce was with the Orient, should be in- 
fluenced by the Constantinopolitan civilization. Mu- 
tinelli records that in the twelfth century they had 
many religious offices and observances in common 
with the Greeks, especially the homily or sermon, 
which formed a very prominent part of the service 
of worship. At this time, also, when the rupture of 
the Lombard League had left other Italian cities to 
fall back into incessant local wars, and barbarized 
their customs, the people of Venice dressed richly and 
delicately, after the Greek fashion. They combed 
and dressed their hair, and wore the long, pointed 
Greek beard ; * and though these Byzantine modes 
fell, for the most part, into disuse, in after-time, there 
is still a peculiarity of dress among the women of 
the Venetian poor which is said to have been inher- 
ited from the oriental costumes of Constantinople; 
namelj^, that high-heeled, sharp-toed slipper, or san- 
dal, vsrhich covers the front of the foot, and drops 

^ A Foscarini, in 1687, was the last patrician who wore the 
beard. 



360 VENETIAN LIFE. 

from the heel at every step, requiring no slight art in 
the wearer to keep it on at all. 

The philosophic vision, accustomed to relate trifling 
particulars to important generalities, may perhaps see 
another relic of Byzantine civilization among the 
Venetians, in that jealous restraint which they put 
upon all the social movements of young girls, and 
the great liberty which they allow to married women. 
It is true that their damsels are now no longer im- 
prisoned under the parental roof, as they were in 
times when they never left its shelter but to go, 
closely veiled, to communion in the church, on 
Christmas and Easter ; but it is still quite impossible 
that any young lady should go out alone. Indeed, 
she would scarcely be secure from insult in broad 
day if she did so. She goes out with her governess, 
and, even with this protection, she cannot be too 
guarded and circumspect in her bearing ; for in 
Venice a woman has to encounter upon the public 
street a rude license of glance, from men of all ages 
and conditions, which falls little short of outrage. 
They stare at her as she approaches ; and I have 
seen them turn and contemplate ladies as they passed 
them, keeping a few paces in advance, with a leisurely 
sidelong gait. Something of this insolence might be 
forgiven to thoughtless, hot-blooded youth ; but the 
gross and knowing leer that the elders of the Piazza 
and the caff^ put on at the approach of a pretty girl 
is an ordeal which few women, not as thoroughly 
inured to it as the Venetians, would care to en- 
counter. However, as I never heard the trial 



SOCIETY. 361 

complained of by any but foreigners, I suppose it is 
not regarded by Italians as intolerable ; and it is cer- 
tain that an audible compliment, upon the street, to 
a pretty girl of the poor, is by no means an affront. 

The arts of pleasing and of coquetry come by na- 
ture to the gentler sex ; and if in Italy they add to 
them a habit of intrigue, I wonder how much they 
are to blame, never being in anywise trusted ? 
They do not differ from persons of any age or 
sex in that country, if the world has been as justly, 
as it has always been firmly, persuaded that the 
people of Italy are effete in point of good faith. 
I have seen much to justify this opinion, and some- 
thing also to confute it ; and as long as Garibaldi 
lives, I shall not let myself believe that a race which 
could produce a man so signally truthful and single- 
hearted is a race of liars and cheats. I think the 
student of their character should also be slow to up- 
braid Italians for their duplicity, without admitting, 
in palliation of the fault, facts of long ages of alien 
and domestic oppression, in politics and religion, 
which must account for a vast deal of every kind of 
evil in Italy, Yet after exception and palliation has 
been duly made, it must be confessed that in Italy it 
does not seem to be thought shameful to tell lies, and 
that there the standard of sincerity, compared with 
that of the English or American, is low, as the Ital- 
ian standard of morality in other respects is also com- 
paratively low. 

With the women, bred in idleness and ignorance, 
the imputed national untruthfulness takes the form 



362 VENETIAN LIFE. 

naturally to be expected, and contributes to a state 
of things whicli must be examined, with the greatest 
caution and reservation by every one but the Italians 
themselves. Goethe says that there is no society so 
corrupt that a man may not live virtuously in it ; and 
I think the immorality of any people will not be di- 
rectly and w^holly seen by the stranger who does not 
seek it. Certainly, the experience and acquaintance 
of a foreiiTner in Italv must have been most unfortu- 
nate, if they confirm all the stories of corruption told 
by Itahans themselves. A little generous distrust is 
best in matters of this kind ; but while I strengthen 
my incredulity concerning the utter depravation of 
Venetian society in one respect, I am not disposed to 
deal so leniently with it in others. The state of 
things is bad in Venice, not because all women in 
society are impure, but because the Italian theory of 
morals does not admit the existence of opportunity 
without sin. It is by rare chance that a young girl 
makes acquaintance with young men in society ; she 
seldom talks with them at the parties to which she is 
sometimes taken by her mother, and they do not call 
upon her at her home ; while for her to walk alone 
with a young man would be vastly more scandalous 
than much worse things, and is, consequently, unheard 
of. The Italians say freely they cannot trust their 
women as northern women are trusted ; and some 
Italian women frankly confess that their sex would be 
Averse if it were trusted more. But the truth does 
not appear in this shallow suspicion and this shallow 
self-conviction ; and one who cares to have a just esti- 



SOCIETY. 863 

mate of this matter must by no means believe all the 
evil he hears. There may be much corruption in so- 
ciety, but there is infinitely more wrong in the habits 
of idle gossip and guilty scandal, which eat all sense 
of shame and pity out of the heart of Venice. There 
is no parallel to the prying, tattling, backbiting little- 
ness of the place elsewhere in the world. A small 
country village in America or England has its med- 
dlesomeness, but not its worldly, wicked sharpness. 
Figure the meanness of a chimney-corner gossip, 
added to the bitter shrewdness and witty penetration 
of a mfted rou^, and vou have some idea of Venetian 
scandal. In that city, where all the nobler organs 
of expression are closed by political conditions, the 
viler channels run continual filth and poison, and the 
people, shut out from public and free discussion of 
religious and political themes, occupy themselves with 
private slander, and rend each other in their abject 
desperation. As it is part of the existing political 
demonstration to avoid the opera and theatre, the 
Venetians are deprived of these harmless distrac- 
tions ; balls and evening parties, at which people, in 
other countries, do nothing worse than bore each 
other, are almost unknown, for the same reason ; and 
when persons meet in society, it is too often to retail 
personalities, or Italian politics made as unintelligible 
and as like local gossip as possible. The talk which 
is small and noxious in private circles is the same 
thing at the caffe, when the dread of spies does not 
reduce the talkers to a dreary silence. Not per- 
mitted to feel the currents of literature and the 



364 VENETIAN LIFE. 

great world's tliought in religion freshly and directly, 
they seldom speak of these things, except in that 
tone of obsolete superiority which Italians are still 
prone to affect, as the monopolists of culture. As to 
Art, the Venetians are insensible to it and ignorant 
of it, here in the very atmosphere of Art, to a degree 
absolutely amusing. I would as soon think of asking 
a fish's opinion of water as of asking a Venetian's 
notion of architecture or painting, unless he were 
himself a professed artist or critic. 

Admitting, however, that a great part of the cor- 
ruption of society is imputed, there still remahis, no 
doubt, a great deal of real immorality to be accounted 
for. This, 1 think, is often to be attributed to the bad 
system of female education, and the habits of idleness 
in which women are bred. Indeed, to Americans, 
the whole system of Italian education seems calcu- 
lated to reduce Avomen to a state of imbecile captivity 
before marriage ; and I have no fault to find with the 
Italians that they are jealous in guarding those whom 
they have unfitted to protect themselves, but have 
rather to blame them that, after marriage, their 
women are thrown at once upon society, when 
worse than helpless against its temptations. Except 
with those people who attempt to maintain a certain 
appearance in public upon insufficient means (and 
there are too many of these in Venice as everywhere 
else), and who spare in every other way that they 
may spend on dress, it does not often happen that 
Venetian ladies are housekeepers. Servants are 
cheap and numerous, as they are uncleanly and un- 



SOCIETY, 865 

trustworthy, and the Venetians prefer to keep them * 
rather than take part in housewifely duties; and, 
since they must lavish upon dress and show, to suffer 
from cold and hunger in their fireless houses a.nd 
at their meagre boards. In this way the young 
girls, kept imprisoned from the world, instead of 
learning cookery and other domestic arts, have the 
grievous burden of idleness added to that of theii 
solitary confinement, not only among the rich and 
noble, but among that large class which is neither 
and wishes to appear both.f Their idle thoughts, 
not drilled by study nor occupied with work, run 
upon the freedom which marriage shall bring them, 
and form a distorted image of the w^orld, of which 
they know as little as of their own undisciplined 

^ A clerk or employe with a salary of fifty cents a day keeps a 
maid-servant, that his wife may fulfill to society the important duty 
of doing nothing. 

t The poet Gray, genteelly making the grand tour in 1740 , 
wrote to his father from Florence : " The only thing the Italians 
shine in is their reception of strangers. At such times every thing 
is magnificence : the more remarkable as in their ordinary course 
of life tliey are parsimonious to a degree of nastiness. I saw in 
one of the vastest palaces of Rome (that of the Prince Pamfilio), 
the apartment which be himself inhabited, a bed that most servants 
in England would disdain to lie in, and furniture much like that 
of a soph at Cambridge. This man is worth 30,000/. a year." 
Italian nature has changed so little in a century, that all this 
would hold admirably true of Italian life at this time. The goodly 
outside in religion, in morals, in every thing is too much the ambi- 
tion of Italy; this achieved, she is content to endure any pang 
of self-denial, and sell wbat little comfort she knows — it is mostly 
imported, like the word, from England — to strangers at fabulous 
prices. In Italy the luxuries of life are cheap, and the conven- 
iences unknown or excessively dear. 



866 VENETIAN LIFE. 

selves. Denied the just and wholesome amusements 
of society during their girlhood, it is scarcely a matter 
of surprise that they should throw themselves into 
the giddiest whirl of its excitement when marriage 
sets them free to do so. 

I have said I do not think Venetians who give 
each other bad names are always to be credited, and 
I have no doubt that many a reputation in Venice is 
stained while the victim remains without guilt. A 
questioned reputation is, however, no great social ca- 
lamity. It forms no bar to society, and few people are 
so cruel as to blame it, though all discuss it. And it 
is here that the harshness of American and Enghsh 
society toward the erring woman (harshness which 
is not injustice, but half-justice only) contrasts visibly 
to our advantage over the bad naivete and lenity of 
the Italians. The carefully secluded Italian girl is 
accustomed to hear of things and speak of things 
which, with us, parents strive in every way to keep 
from their daughters' knowledge ; and while her 
sense of delicacy is thus early blunted, while she is 
thus used to know good and evil, she hears her father 
and mother comment on the sinful errors of a friend or 
neighbor, who visits them and meets them every day 
in society. How can the impunity of the guilt wliich 
she believes to exist around her but sometimes have 
its effect, and ripen, with opportunity, into wrong ? 
Nay, if the girl reveres her parents at all, how can 
she think the sin, which they caress in the sinner, is so 
very bad ? If, however, she escape all these early 
influences of depravation ; if her idleness, and soli- 



i 



SOCIETY. 367 

tude, and precocious knowledge leave lier unvitiated ; 
if, when she goes into society, it is by marriage with 
a man who is neither a dotard^ nor a fortune-seeker, 
and who remains constant and does not tempt her, 
by neglect, to forbode offense and to inflict anticipa- 
tive reprisals — yet her purity goes uncredited, as 
her guilt w^ould go unpunished ; scandal makes haste 
to blacken her name to the prevailing hue ; and 
whether she has sin or not, those with sin will cast, 
not the stone that breaks and kills, but the filth that 
sticks and stinks. The wife must continue the long 
social exile of her girlhood if she would not be the 
.prey of scandal. The cavalier e servente no longer 
exists, but gossip now attributes often more than one 
lover in his place, and society has the cruel clemency 
to wink at the license. Nothing is in worse taste 
than jealousy, and, consequently, though intrigue 
sometimes causes stabbing, and the like, among low 
people, it is rarely noticed by persons of good breed- 
ing. It seems to me that in Venetian society the 
reform must begin, not with dissolute life, but with 
the social toleration of the impure, and with the 
wanton habits of scandal, which make all other life 
incredible, and deny to virtue the triumph of fair 
fame. 

I confess that what I saw of the innocent amuse- 
ments of this society was not enough to convince 
me of their brilliancy and attractiveness ; but I 
doubt if a foreigner can be a trustworthy judge of 
these things, and perhaps a sketch drawn by an alien 
hand, in the best faith, might have an air of carica- 



368 VENETIAN LIFE. 

ture. I would not, therefore, like to trust my own 
impression of social diversions. They were, very 
probably, much more lively and brilliant than I 
thought them. But Italians assembled anywhere, 
except at the theatre or the caff§, have a certain stiff- 
ness, all the more surprising, because tradition has 
always led one to expect exactly the reverse of them. 
I have seen nothing equal to the formality of this 
people, who deride colder nations for inflexible man- 
ners ; and I have certainly never seen society in any 
small town in America so ill at ease as I have 
seen society in Venice, writhing under self-imposed 
restraints. At a musical soiree, attended by the 
class of people who at home would have been chatty 
and sociable, given to making acquaintance and to 
keeping up acquaintance, — the young men harm- 
lessly talking and walking with the young ladies, 
and the old people listening together, while con- 
stant movement and intercourse kept life in the 
assembly, and there was some real pleasure felt 
amidst a good deal of unavoidable suffering, — I say, 
I found such a soiree in Venice to be a spectacle of 
ladies planted in formal rows of low-necks and white 
dresses around the four sides of one room, and of 
gentlemen restively imprisoned in dress-coats and 
white gloves in another. During the music all these 
devoted people listened attentively, and at the end, 
the ladies lapsed back into their chairs and fanned 
themselves, while the gentlemen walked up and 
down the floor of their cell, and stopped, two by two, 
at the door of the ladies' room, glanced mournfully 



SOCIETY. 369 

athwart the moral barrier which divided them, and 
sadly and dejectedly turned away. Amazed at this 
singular species of social enjoyment, I inquired after- 
ward, of a Venetian lady, if evening parties in Ven- 
ice were usually such ordeals, and was discouraged 
to learn that what I had seen was scarcely an exag- 
geration of prevailing torments. Commonly people 
do not know each other, and it is difficult for the 
younger to procure introductions ; and when there is 
previous acquaintance, the presence of some com- 
manding spirit is necessary to break the ice of pro- 
priety, and substitute enjoyment for correctness of 
behavior. Even at dancing parties, where it would 
seem that the poetry of motion might do something 
to soften the rigid bosom of Venetian deportment, 
the poor young people separate after each dance, 
and take each sex its appointed prison, till the next 
quadrille offers them a temporary liberation. For 
my own part, I cannot wonder that young men fly 
these virtuous scenes, and throng the rooms of those 
pleasant women of the demi-monde^ who only exact 
from them that they shall be natural and agreeable ; 
I cannot wonder that their fair partners in wretched- 
ness seize the first opportunity to revenge themselves 
upon the propriety which has so cruelly used them. 
It is said that the assemblies of the Jews, while quite 
as unexceptionable in character, are far more sociable 
and lively than those of the Christians. The young 
Hebrews are frequently intelligent, well-bred, and 
witty, with a savoir faire which their Christian breth- 
ren lack. But, indeed, the young Venetian is, at 

24 



370 VENETIAN LIFE. 

that age when all men are owlish, ignorant, and 
vapid, the most owlish, ignorant, and vapid man in 
the world. He talks, not milk-and-water, but warm 
water alone, a little sweetened ; and, until he has 
grown wicked, has very httle good in him. 

Most ladies of fashion receive calls on a certain 
day of each week, when it is made a matter of pride 
to receive as many calls as possible. The number 
sometimes reaches three hundred, when nobody sits 
down, and few exchange more than a word with the 
hostess. In winter, the stove is heated on these re- 
ception days, and little cups of black coffee are passed 
round to the company ; in summer lemonade is sub- 
stituted for the coffee ; but in all seasons a thin, 
waferish slice of toasted rusk (the Venetian haicolo^ 
is offered to each guest with the drink. At recep- 
tions where the sparsity of the company permits the 
lady of the house to be seen, she is commonly visible 
on a sofa, surrounded by visitors in a half-circle. 
Nobody stays more than ten or fifteen minutes, and I 
have sometimes found even this brief time of much 
greater apparent length, and apt to produce a low 
state of nerves, from which one seldom recovers 
before dinner. Gentlemen, however, do not much 
frequent these receptions ; and I assert again the 
diffidence I should feel in offering this glance at 
Venetian social enjoyment as conveying a just and 
full idea of it. There is no doubt that the Venetians 
find delight in their assemblies, where a stranger 
seeks it in vain. I dare say they would not think 
our own reunions brilliant, and that, looking ob- 



SOCIETY. 371 

liquely (as a foreigner must) on the most sensible 
faces at one of our evening parties, they might mis- 
take the look of pathetic dejection, visible in them, as 
the expression of people rather bored by their pleas- 
ure than otherwise. 

The conversazioni are of all sorts, from the con- 
versazioni of the rigid proprietarians, where people 
sit down to a kind of hopeless whist, at a soldo the 
point, and say nothing, to the conversazioni of the 
demi-monde where they say any thing. There are 
persons in Venice, as well as everywhere else, of 
new-fashioned modes of thinking, and these strive to 
give a greater life and ease to their assemblies, by 
attracting as many young men as possible ; and in 
their families, gentlemen are welcome to visit, and to 
talk with the young ladies in the presence of their 
mothers. But though such people are no more ac- 
cused of impropriety than the straitest of the old- 
fashioned, they are not regarded with the greatest 
esteem, and their daughters do not so readily find 
husbands. The Italians are fickle, the women say ; 
they get soon tired of their wi^s after marriage, and 
when they see much of ladies^||fore marriage, they 
get tired of them then, and never make them their 
wives. So it is much better to see nothing of a pos- 
sible husband till you actually have him. I do not 
think conversazioni of anj^ kind are popular w^ith 
young men, however ; they like better to go to the 
caff^, and the people you meet at private houses are 
none the less interesting for being old, or middle- 
aged. . A great many of the best families, at prese^jt, 



372 VENETIAN LIFE. 

receive no company at all, and see their friends only 
in the most private manner ; though there are still 
cultivated circles to which proper introduction gives 
the stranger (who has no Austrian acquaintance) 
access. But unless he have thorough knowledge of 
Italian politics localized to apply to Venice, an inter- 
est in the affairs, fortunes, and misfortunes of his 
neighbors, and an acquaintance with the Venetian 
dialect, I doubt if he will be able to enjoy himself 
in the places so cautiously opened to him. Even in 
the most cultivated society, the dialect is habitually 
spoken ; and if Italian is used, it is only in compli- 
ment to some foreigner present, for whose sake, also, 
topics of general interest are sometimes chosen. 

The best society is now composed of the families 
of professional men, such as the advocates, the physi- 
cians, and the richer sort of merchants. The shop- 
keepers, master-artisans, and others, whom industry 
and thrift distinguish from the populace, seem not to 
have any social life, in the American sense. They 
are wholly devoted to affairs, and partly from choice, 
and partly from necessity, are sordid and grasping. 
It is their class which has to fight hardest for life in 
Europe, and they give no quarter to those above or 
below them. The shop is their sole thought and in- 
terest, and they never, never sink it. But, since 
they have habits of diligence, and, as far as they are 
permitted, of enterprise, they seem to be in great 
part the stuff" from which a prosperous State is to be 
rebuilt in Venice, if ever the fallen edifice rise again. 
They have sometimes a certain independence of char- 



SOCIETY. 373 

acter, which a better condition of things, and further 
education, would perhaps lift into honesty; though 
as yet they seem not to scruple to take any unfair 
advantage, and not to know that commercial suc- 
cess can never rest permanently on a system of bad 
faith. Below this class is the populace, between 
which and the patrician order a relation something 
like Roman clientage existed, contributing greatly to 
the maintenance of exclusively aristocratic power in 
the State. The greatest conspiracy (that of Marin 
Falier) which the commons ever moved against the 
oligarchy was revealed to one of the nobility by his 
plebeian creature, or client ; and the government 
rewarded by every species of indulgence a class in 
which it had extinguished even the desire of popular 
liberty. The heirs of the servile baseness which 
such a system as this must create are not yet extinct. 
There is still a helplessness in many of the servant 
class, and a disposition to look for largess as well as 
wages, which are the traits naturally resulting from 
a state of voluntary submission to others. The no- 
bles, as the government, enervated and debauched 
the character of the poor by public shows and count- 
less holidays ; as individuals, they taught them to de- 
pend upon patrician favor, and not upon their own 
plebeian industry, for support. The lesson was an 
evil one, hard to be unlearned, and it is yet to be for- 
gotten in Venice. Certain traits of soft and familiar 
dependence give great charm to the populace ; but 
their existence makes the student doubtful of a future 
to which the plebeians themselves look forward with 



374 VENETIAN LIFE. 

perfect hope and confidence. It may be that they 
are right, and will really rise to the dignity of men, 
when free government shall have taught them that 
the laborer is worthy of his hire — after he has earned 
it. This has been the result, to some degree, in the 
kingdom of Italy, where the people have found that 
freedom, like happiness, means w^ork. 

Undoubtedly the best people in the best society of 
Venice are the advocates, an order of consequence 
even in the times of the Republic, though then shut 
out from participation in public affairs by a native 
government, as now by a foreign one. Acquaintance 
with several members of this profession impressed me 
with a sense of its liberality of thought and feeling, 
^vhere all liberal thinking and feeling must be done 
by stealth, and where the common intelligence of the 
world sheds its light through multiplied barriers. 
Daniele Manin, the President of the Republic of 
1848, was of this class, which, by virtue of its learn- 
ing, enlightenment, and talent, occupies a place in the 
esteem and regard of the Venetian people far above 
that held by the effete aristocracy. The better part 
of the nobility, indeed, is merged in the professional 
class, and some of the most historic names are now 
preceded by the learned titles of Doctor and Advo- 
cate, rather than the cheap dignity of Count, offered 
by the Austrian government to all the patricians who 
chose to ask for it, when Austrian rule was extended 
over their country. 

The physicians rank next to the advocates, and 
are usually men learned in their profession, however 



SOCIETY. 375 

erroneous and old-fasliioned some of tlieir theories of 
practice may be. Like the advocates, they are often 
men of letters : they write for the journals, and pub- 
lish little pamphlets on those topics of local history 
which it is so much the fashion to treat in Venice. 
No one makes a profession of authorship. The re- 
turns of an author's work would be too uncertain, and 
its restrictions and penalties would be too vexatious 
and serious ; and so literary topics are only occasion- 
ally treated by those whose main energies are bent 
in another direction. 

The doctors are very numerous, and a considerable 
number of them are Hebrews, who, even in the old 
jealous times, exercised the noble art of medicine, 
and who now rank very highly among their profes- 
sional brethren. These physicians haunt the neat 
and tasteful apothecary shops,^ where they sit upon 
the benching that passes round the interior, read the 
newspapers, and discuss the politics of Europe, Asia, 
Africa, and America, with all the zest that you may 
observe to characterize their discussions in Goldoni's 
plays. There they spend their evenings, and many 
hours of every day, and thither the sick send to call 
them, — each physician resorting to a particular apoth- 
ecary's, and keeping his name inscribed on a brass 
plate against the wall, above the head of the druggist, 
who presides over the reunions of the doctors, while 
his apprentice pestles away at their prescriptions. 

In 1786 there were, what w^ith priests, monks, 
and nuns, a multitude of persons of ecclesiastical pro- 
fession in Venice ; and though many convents and 



376 VENETIAN LIFE. 

monasteries were abolished by Napoleon, the priests 
are still very numerous, and some monastic establish- 
ments have been revived under Austrian rule. The 
high officers of the Church are, of course, well paid, 
but most of the priesthood live miserably enough. 
They receive from the government a daily stipend 
of about thirty-five soldi, and they celebrate mass, 
when they can get something to do in that way, for 
forty soldi. Unless, then, they have private income 
from their own family, or have pay for the education 
of some rich man's son or daughter, they must fare 
slenderly. 

There is much said, in and out of Venice, about 
their influence in society ; but this is greatly modified, 
and I think is chiefly exercised upon the women of 
the old-fashioned famihes.* I need hardly repeat 
the well-known fact that all the moral power of the 
Roman Church over the younger men is gone ; these 
seldom attend mass, and almost never go to confes- 
sion, and the priests are their scorn and by- word. 
Their example, in some degree, must be much fol- 
lowed also by women ; and though women must 
everywhere make more public professions of rehgion 
than men, in order to retain social standing, I doubt 
if the priests have a very firm hold upon the fears or 

* It is no longer usual for girls to be educated in convents, and 
most young ladies of the better classes, up to the age of thirteen 
or fourteen years, receive their schooling in secular establish- 
ments, whither they go every day for study, or where they some- 
times Uve as in our boarding-schools, and where they are taught 
the usual accompUshments, greater attention being paid to French 
and music than to other things. 



SOCIETY. 377 

reverence of the sisters and wives of liberal Vene- 
tians. 

If, however, they contribute in anywise to keep 
down the people, they are themselves enslaved to their 
superiors and to each other. No priest can leave the 
city of Venice without permission of the Patriarch. 
He is cut off as much as possible from his own kins- 
people, and subjected to the constant surveillance 
of his class. Obliged to maintain a respectable ap- 
pearance on twenty cents a day, — hampered and 
hindered from all personal liberty and private friend- 
ship, and hated by the great mass of the people, — I 
hardly think the Venetian priest is to be envied in 
his life. For my own part, knowing these things, I 
was not able to cherish toward the priests those feel- 
ings of scornful severity which swell many Protestant 
bosoms ; and so far as I made their acquaintance, I 
found them kind and amiable. One ecclesiastic, at 
least, I may describe as one of the most agreeable 
and cultivated gentlemen I ever met. 

Those who fare best among the priests are the 
Jesuits, who returned from repeated banishment with 
the Austrians in this century. Their influence is 
very extended, and the confessional is their forte. 
Venetians say that with the old and the old-fashioned 
these crafty priests suggest remorse and impose 
penances ; that with the young men and the latter- 
day thinkers they are men of the world, and pass 
off' pleasant sins as trifles. All the students of the 
government schools are obliged by law to confess 
twice a month, and are given printed certificates of 



378 VENETIAN LIFE. 

confession, in blank, wliicli the confessor fills up and 
stamps with the seal of the Church. Most of them 
go to confess at the church of the Jesuits, who are 
glad to hear the cock-and-bull story invented by the 
student, and to cultivate his friendship by an easy 
penance and a hberal tone. This ingenuous young 
man of course despises the confessional. He goes to 
confess because the law obliges him to do so ; but 
the law cannot dictate what he must confess. There- 
fore, he ventures as near downright burlesque as he 
dares, and (if the account he gives of the matter be 
true) puts off his confessor with some well-known 
fact, as that he has blasphemed. Of course he has 
blasphemed, blasphemy being as common as the forms 
of salutation in Venice. So the priest, who wishes 
him to come again, and to found some sort of influence 
over him, says, — '' Oh dear, dear ! This is very bad. 
Blasphemy is deadly sin. If you must swear, swear 
by the heathen gods : say Body of Diana, instead of 
Body of God ; Presence of the Devil, instead of 
Blood of Mary. Then there is no harm done." The 
students laugh over the pleasant absurdity together, 
and usually agree upon the matter of their semi- 
monthly confessions beforehand. 

As I have hinted, the young men do not love the 
government or the Church, and though I account 
for the loss of much high hope and generous sym- 
pathy in growth from youth to middle age, I cannot 
see how, when they have replaced their fathers, the 
present religious and political discontent is to be 
modified. Nay, I believe it must become Avorse. 



SOCIETY. 379 

The middle-aged men of Venice grew up in times 
of comparative quiet, when she did not so much care 
who ruled over her, and negatively, at least, they 
honored the Church. They may now hate the foreign 
rule, but there are many considerations of timidity, 
and many effects of education, to temper their hate. 
They may dislike the priests, but they revere the 
Church. The young men of to-day are bred in a 
different school, and all their thoughts are of opposi- 
tion 'to the government and of war upon the Church, 
which they detest and ridicule. The fact that their 
education Is still In the hands of the priests in some 
measure, does not render them more tractable. They 
have no fears to be wrought upon by their clerical 
professors, who seldom have sought to act upon their 
nobler qualities. The Influence of the priesthood is 
again limited by the fact that the teachers In the 
free schools of the city, to which the poor send their 
children, are generally not priests ; and ecclesiastics 
are no longer so commonly the private tutors of the 
children of the rich, as they once .w^ere when they 
lived with the family, and exercised a direct and 
important Influence on It. Express permission from 
the pope Is now necessary to the maintenance of a 
family chaplain, and the office is nearly disused.* 

The Republic was extremely jealous of the politi- 
cal power of the priests, who could not hold secular 

^ In early days every noble Venetian family had its chaplain, 
who, on the occasion of great dinners and suppers, remained in 
the kitchen, and received as one of his perquisites the fragments 
that came back from the table. 



S80 VENETIAN LIFE. 

office in its time. A curious punishment was inflicted 
upon the priest who proved false to his own vows of 
chastity, and there is a most amusing old ballad — by 
no means cleanly in its language — purporting to be 
the lament of a priest suspended in the iron cage, 
appointed for the purpose, from the belfry of the 
Campanile San Marco, and enduring the jeers and 
insults of the mob below. We may suppose that with 
advancing corruption (if corruption has indeed ad- 
vanced from remote to later times) this punishment 
was disused for want of room to hang out the delin- 
quents. In the last century, especially, the nuns 
and monks led a pleasant life. You may see in the 
old pictures of Pietro Longhi and his school, how at 
the aristocratic and fashionable convent of San Zac- 
caria, the lady nuns received their friends and ac- 
quaintances of this world in the anteroom, where 
the dames and their cavaliers flirted and drank cof- 
fee, and the gentlemen coquetted with the brides of 
heaven through their grated windows. 

Among other privileges of the Church, abolished 
in Venice long ago, was that ancient right of the 
monks of St. Anthony, Abbot, by which their herds 
of swine were made free of the whole city. These 
animals, enveloped in an odor of sanctity, wandered 
here and there, and were piously fed by devout 
people, until the year 1409, when, being found dan- 
gerous to children and inconvenient to every body, 
they were made the subject of a special decree, which 
deprived them of their freedom of movement. The 
Republic was always limiting the privileges of the 



SOCIETY. 381 

Church ! It is known how when the holy inquisition 
was established in its dominions in 1249, the State 
stipulated that great part of the process against heresy 
should be conducted by secular functionaries, and 
that the sentence should rest with the Doge and his 
councillors, — a kind of inquisition with claws clipped 
and teeth filed, as one may say, and the only sort 
ever permitted in Venice. At present there is no 
absolute disfavor shown to the clergy ; but, as we 
have seen, many a pleasant island, which the monks 
of old reclaimed from the salty marshes, and planted 
with gardens and vineyards, now bears only the ruins 
of their convents, or else, converted into a fortress or 
government d^p8t, is all thistly with bayonets. An- 
ciently, moreover, there were many little groves in 
different parts of the city, where the pleasant clergy, 
of what Mr. Ruskin would have us believe the pure 
and religious days of Venice, met and made merry 
so riotously together by night that the higher officers 
of the Church were forced to prohibit their httle 
soiri^es. 

An old custom of rejoicing over the installation 
of a new parish priest is still to be seen in almost 
primitive quaintness. The people of each parish — 
nobles, citizens, and plebeians alike — formerly elected 
their own priest, and, till the year 1576, they used 
to perambulate the city to the sound of drums, with 
banners flying, after an election, and proclaim the 
name of their favorite. On the day of the parrocd*s 
induction his portrait was placed over the church 
door, and after the celebration of the morning mass, 



882 VENETIAN LIFE. 

a breakfast was given, which grew to be so splendid 
in time, that in the fifteenth century a statute limited 
its profusion. In the afternoon the new parroco, 
preceded by a band of miHtary music, visited all the 
streets and courts of his parish, and then, as now, all 
the windows of the parish were decorated with 
brilliant tapestries, and other gay-colored cloths and 
pictures. In those times as in these, there was an 
illumination at night, throngs of people in the campo 
of the church, and booths for traffic in cakes of flour 
and raisins, — fried in lard upon the spot, and sold 
smoking hot, with immense uproar on the part of the 
merchant ; and for three days afterward the parish 
bells were sounded in concert. 

The difficulty of ascertaining any thing with cer- 
tainty in Venice attends in a degree peculiarly great 
the effort to learn exactly the present influence and 
standing of the nobility as a class. One is tempted, 
on observing the free and unembarrassed bearing of 
all ranks of people toward each other, to say that no 
sense of difference exists, — and I do not think there 
is ever shown, among Italians, either the aggressive 
pride or the abject meanness which marks the inter- 
course of people and nobles elsewhere in Europe ; 
and I have not seen the distinction of rich and poor 
made so brutally in Italy as sometimes in our own 
soi'disant democratic society at home. There is, 
indeed, that equality in Italian fibre which I believe 
fits the nation for democratic institutions better than 
any other, and which is perhaps partly the result of 
their ancient civilization. At any rate, it fascinates 



SOCIETY. 383 

a stranger to see people so mutually gentle and def- 
erential ; and must often be a matter of surprise to 
the Anglo-Saxon, in whose race, reclaimed from 
barbarism more recently, the native wild-beast is still 
so strong as to sometimes inform the manner. The 
uneducated Anglo-Saxon is a savage ; the Italian, 
though born to utter ignorance, poverty, and deprav- 
ity, is a civilized man. I do not say that his civiliza- 
tion is of a high order, or that the civilization of the 
most cultivated Italian is at all comparable to that 
of a gentleman among ourselves. The Italian's edu- 
cation, however profound, has left his passions un- 
disciplined, while it has carefully polished his manner ; 
he yields lightly to temptation, he loses his self- 
control, he blasphemes habitually ; his gentleness is 
conventional, his civilization not individual. With 
us the education of a gentleman (I do not mean a 
person born to wealth or station, but any man who 
has trained himself in morals or religion, in letters, 
and in the world) disciplines the impulses, and 
leaves the good manner to grow naturally out of 
habits of self-command and consequent habitual self- 
respect. 

The natural equality of the Italians is visible in 
their community of good looks as well as good 
manners. They have never, perhaps, that high 
beauty of sensitive expression which is found among 
Englishmen and Americans (preferably among the 
latter), but it very rarely happens that they are 
brutally ugly ; and the man of low rank and mean 
vocation has often a beauty of as fine sort as the 



384 VENETIAN LIFE. 

man of education and refinement. If tliey changed 
clothes, and the poor man could be persuaded to 
wash himself, they might successfully masquerade, 
one for another. The plebeian Italian, inspired by 
the national vanity, bears himself as proudly as the 
noble, without at all ao-crressino; in his manner. His 
beauty, like that of the women of his class, is world- 
old, — the beauty of the pictures and the statues : 
the ideal types of loveliness are realized in Italy ; 
the saints and heroes, the madonnas and nymphs, 
come true to the stranger at every encounter with 
living faces. In Venice, particularly, the carriage 
of the women, of whatever rank, is very free and 
noble, and the servant is sometimes to be distinguished 
from the mistress only by her dress and by her labor- 
coarsened hands ; certainly not always by her dirty 
finger-nails and foul teeth, for though the clean shirt 
is now generally in Italy, some lesser virtues are still 
unknown : the nail-brush and tooth-brush are of but 
infrequent use ; the four-pronged fork is still imper- 
fectly understood, and as a nation the Italians may 
be said to eat with their knives. 

The Venetian, then, seeing so little difference be- 
tween himself and others, whatever his rank may be, 
has, as I said, little temptation to arrogance or ser- 
vility. The effects of the old relationship of patron 
and client are amusingly noticeable in the superior 
as well as the inferior ; a rich man's dependents are 
perfectly free with advice and comment, and it some- 
times happens that he likes to hear their lively talk, 
and at home secretly consorts with his servants. The 



SOCIETY. 385 

former social differences between commoners and pa- 
tricians (which, I think, judging from the natural 
temper of the race, must have been greatly modified 
at all times by concession and exception) may be said 
to have quite disappeared in point of fact ; the nobil- 
ity is now almost as effete socially as it is politically. 
There is still a number of historic families, which are 
in a certain degree exclusive ; but rich parvenus have 
admission to their friendship, and commoners in good 
circumstances are permitted their acquaintance ; the 
ladies of this patrician society visit ladies of less rank, 
and receive them at their great parties, though not 
at more sacred assemblies, where they see only each 
other. 

The Venetians have a habit of saying their best 
families are in exile, but this is not meant to be 
taken literally. Many of the best families are yet 
in the city, living in perfect retirement, or very often 
merged in the middle class, and become men of pro- 
fessions, and active, useful lives. Of these nobles 
(they usually belong to the families which did not 
care to ask nobility of Austria, and are therefore un- 
titled) * the citizens are affectionately proud, while 
I have heard from them nothing but contempt and 
ridicule of the patricians who, upon a wretched 

=* The only title conferred on any patrician of Venice during 
the Republic was Cavaliere, and this was conferred by a legisla- 
tive act in reward of distinguished service. The names of the 
nobility were written in the Golden Book of the Republic, and 
they were addressed as Illustrissimo or Eccellenza. They also 
signed themselves nohiley between the Christian name and sur- 
name, as it is still the habit of the untitled nobility to do. 
25 



886 VENETIAN LIFE. 

pension or meagre government office, attempt to 
maintain patrician distinction. Such nobles are usu- 
ally Austriacanti in their politics, and behind the 
age in every thing ; while there are other descend- 
ants of patrician families mingled at last with the 
very populace, sharing their ignorance and degrada- 
tion, and feeling with them. These sometimes exer- 
cise the most menial employments : I knew one noble 
lord who had been a facchino, and I heard of another 
who was a street-sweeper. Conte die non eonta^ non 
conta niente^^ says the sneering Italian proverb ; and 
it would be little less than miraculous if a nobility 
like that of modern Venice maintained superior state 
and regard in the eyes of the quick-witted, intelli- 
gent, sarcastic commonalty. 

The few opulent patricians are by no means the 
most violent of Italianissimi. They own lands and 
houses, and as property is unsafe when revolutionary 
feeling is rife, their patriotism is tempered. The 
wealth amassed in early times by the vast and enter- 
prising commerce of the country was, when not dis- 
sipated in riotous splendor, invested in real estate 
upon the main-land as the Republic grew in territory, 
and the income of the nobles is now from the rents 
of these lands. They reside upon their estates dur- 
ing the season of the villeggiatura^ which includes 
the months of September and October, when every 
one who can possibly leave the city goes into the 
country. Then the patricians betake themselves to 
their villas near Padua, Vicenza, Bassano, and Tre- 
* A count who does n't count (money) counts for nothing. 



SOCIETY. 387 

viso, and people the sad-colored, weather-worn stucco 
hermitages, where the mutilated statues, swaggering 
above the gates, forlornly commemorate days when it 
was a far finer thing to be a noble than it is now. I 
say the villas look dreary and lonesome as places can 
be made to look in Italy, what with their high garden 
walls, their long, low piles of stabling, and the passee 
indecency of their nymphs and fauns, foolishly strut- 
ting in the attitudes of the silly and sinful old Past ; 
and it must be but a dull life that the noble proprie- 
tors lead there. 

It is better, no doubt, on the banks of the Brenta, 
where there are still so many villas as to form a 
street of these seats of luxury, almost the w^hole 
length of the canal, from Fusina to Padua. I am 
not certain that they have a right to the place which 
they hold in literature and sentiment, and yet there 
is something very charming about them, with their 
gardens, and chapels, and statues, and shaded walks. 
We went to see them one day early in October, 
and found them every one, when habitable, inhab- 
ited, and wearing a cheerful look, that made their 
proximity to Venice incredible. As we returned 
home after dark, we saw the ladies from the vil- 
las walking unattended along the road, and giving 
the scene an air of homelike peace and trustfulness 
which I had not found before in Italy; while the 
windows of the houses were brilliantly lighted, as if 
people lived in them ; whereas, you seldom see a light 
in Venetian palaces. I am not sure that I did not 
like better, however, the villas that were empty and 



388 VENETIAN LIFE. 

ruinous, and the gardens that had run wild, and the 
statues that had lost legs and arms. Some of the 
ingenious proprietors had enterprisingly whitewashed 
their statues, and there was a horrible primness about 
certain of the well-kept gardens which offended me. 
Most of the houses were not large, but there was 
here and there a palace as grand as any in the city. 
Such was the great, villa of the Contarini of the 
Lions, which was in every way superb, with two 
great lions of stone guarding its portals, aiid a gravel 
walk, over-arched with stately trees, stretching a 
quarter of a mile before it. At the moment I was 
walking down this aisle I met a clean-shaven old 
canonico, with red legs and red-tasseled hat, and with 
a book under his arm, and a meditative look, whom 
I here thank for being so venerably picturesque. 
The palace itself was shut up, and I wish I had 
known, when I saw it, that it had a ghostly un- 
derground passage from its cellar to the chapel, — 
wherein, when you get halfway, your light goes out, 
and you consequently never reach the chapel. 

This is at Mira ; but the greatest of all the villas 
is the magnificent country-seat of the family Pisani 
at Stra, which now, with scarcely any addition to its 
splendor, serves for the residence of the abdicated 
Emperor of Austria. There is such pride in the vast- 
ness of this edifice and its gardens as impresses you 
with the material greatness which found expression 
in it, and never raises a regret that it has utterly 
passed away. You wander around through the 
aisles of trim-cut lime-trees, bullied and overborne 



SOCIETY. 389 

by the insolent statues, and expect at every turn to 
come upon intriguing spectres in bag- wigs, immense 
hoops and patches. How can you feel sympathy for 
those dull and wicked ghosts of eighteenth-century 
corruption ? There is rottenness enough in the world 
without digging up old putridity and sentimentalizing 
on it ; and I doubt if you will care to know much of 
the way in which the noble owner of such a villa 
ascended the Brenta at the season of the villeggiatura 
in his great gilded barge, all carven outside with the 
dumpling loves and loose nymphs of the period, with 
fruits, and flowers, and what not ; and within, luxu- 
riously cushioned and furnished, and stocked with 
good things for pleasure making in the gross old fash- 
ion.* King Cole was not a merrier old soul than 
Illustrissimo of that day ; he outspent princes ; and 
his agent, while he harried the tenants to supply his 
master's demands, plundered Illustrissimo frightfully. 
Illustrissimo* never looked at accounts. He said to 
his steward, " Caro veccio^ fe vu. Mi remeto a quel 
die fe vu,^^ (Old fellow, you attend to it. I shall 
be satisfied with what you do.) So the poor agent 
had no other course but to swindle him, which he 
did ; and Illustrissimo, when he died, died poor, and 
left his lordly debts and vices to his sons. 

In Venice, the noble still lives sometimes in his 
ancestral palace, dimly occupying the halls where his 
forefathers flourished in so much splendor. I can 
conceive, indeed, of no state of things more flattering 

"^ Mutinelli, Gli Ultimi Cinquant* Anni della Repuhhlica di Vene* 



390 VENETIAN LIFE. 

to human pride than that which surrounded the pa- 
trician of the old aristocratic Repubhc. The house 
in which he dwelt was the palace of a king, in luxury 
of appointment and magnificence of size. Troops of 
servants that ministered to his state peopled its vast 
extent ; and the gondolas that carried his grandeur 
abroad were moored in little fleets to the piles that 
rose before his palace, painted with the family arms 
and colors. The palace itself stood usually on the 
Grand Canal, and rose sheer from the water, giving 
the noble that haughty inaccessibihty which the lord 
of the main - land achieved only by building lofty 
walls and multiplying gates. The architecture was 
as costly in its ornament as wild Gothic fancy, or 
Renaissance luxury of bad taste, could make it ; and 
when the palace front was not of sculptured marble, 
the painter's pencil filled it with the delight of color. 
The main-land noble's house was half a fortress, and 
formed his stronghold in times of popular tumult or 
family fray ; but at Venice the strong arm of St. 
Mark suppressed all turbulence in a city secure from 
foreign war ; and the peaceful arts rejoiced in undis- 
turbed possession of the palaces, which rose in the 
most delicate and fantastic beauty, and mirrored in 
the brine a dream of sea-deep strangeness and rich- 
ness. You see much of the beauty yet, but the pride 
and opulence which called it into being are gone for- 
ever. 

Most palaces, whether of the Gothic or classicistic 
period, have the same internal arrangement of halls 
and chambers, and are commonly built of two lofty 



SOCIETY. 391 

and two low stories. On the ground floor, or water 
level, is a hall running back from the gate to a bit of 
garden at the other side of the palace ; and on either 
side of this hall, which in old times was hung with 
the family trophies of the chase and war, are the por- 
ter's lodge and gondoliers' rooms. On the first and 
second stories are the family apartments, opening on 
either side from great halls, of the same extent as 
that below, but with loftier roofs, of heavy rafters 
gilded or painted. The fourth floor is of the same 
arrangement, but has a lower roof, and was devoted 
to the better class of servants. Of the two stories 
used by the family, the third is the loftier and 
airier, and was occupied in summer ; the second was 
the winter apartment. On either hand the rooms 
open in suites. 

We have seen something of the ceremonies, public 
and private, which gave peculiar gayety and brill- 
iance to the life of the Venetians of former days ; 
but in his political character the noble had yet 
greater consequence. He was part of the proudest, 
strongest, and securest system of his time. He was 
a king with the fellowship of kings, flattered with the 
equality of an aristocracy which was master of itself, 
and of its nominal head. During the earlier times it 
was his office to go daily to Rialto and instruct the 
people in their political rights and duties for four 
hours ; and even when the duties became every thing 
and the rights nothing (after the Serrar del Con- 
siglio), the friendly habit of d^ily intercourse be- 
tween patricians and citizens was still kept up at the 



392 VENETIAN LIFE. 

same place. Once each week, and on every holi- 
day, the noble took his seat in the Grand Council 
(the most august assembly in the world, without 
doubt), or the Ten, or the Three, according to his 
office in the State, — holding his place in the Council 
by right of birth, and in the other bodies by election 
of his peers. 

Although the patricians were kept as one family 
apart from the people, and jealously guarded* in their 
aristocratic purity by the State, they were only equals 
of the poorest before the laws of their own creation, 
and their condescension to the people was frequent 
and great. Indeed, the Venetians of all classes are 
social creatures, loving talk and gossip, and these 
constant habits of intercourse must have done much 
to produce that equality of manner now observable in 
them. Their amusements were for a long time the 
same, the nobles taking part in the public holidays, 
and in the popular exercises of rowing and swimming. 
In the earlier times, hunting in the lagoons was a 
favorite diversion ; but as the decay of the Republic 
advanced, and the patrician blossomed into the fine 
gentleman of the last century, these hearty sports 
were relinquished, and every thing was voted vul- 
gar but masking in carnival, dancing and gaming at 
Ridotto, and intriguing everywhere. 

The accounts which Venetian writers give of Re- 
publican society in the eighteenth century form a 
ehronique scandaleuse which need not be minutely 
. copied here. Much may be learned of Venetian man- 
ners of this time from the comedies of Goldoni ; and 



SOCIETY. 393 

the faithlessness of society may be argued from the 
fact that in tliese plays, which contain nothing sala- 
cious or indecent, there is scarcely a character of any 
rank who scruples to tell lies ; and the truth is not 
to be found in w^orks intended to school the public 
to virtue. The ingenious old playwright's memoirs 
are full of gossip concerning that poor old Venice, 
w^hich is now no more ; and the worthy autobiogra- 
pher, Casanova, also gives much information about 
things that had best not be known. 

As the Republic drew near its fall, in 1797, there 
was Httle left in its dominant class worth saving, if 
w^e may believe the testimony of Venetians wdiich 
Mutinelli brings to bear upon the point in his " An- 
nali Urbani," and his " History of the Last Fifty 
Years of the Republic." Long prosperity and pro- 
digious opulence had done their worst, and the pa- 
tricians, and the lowest orders of the people, their 
creatures and dependants, were thoroughly corrupt ; 
while the men of professions began to assume that 
station which they now hold. The days of a fash- 
ionable patrician of those ' times began at a little 
before sunset, and ended with the follow^ing dawn. 
Rising from his bed, he dressed himself in dainty 
linen, and placed himself in the hands of the hair- 
dresser to be combed, oiled, perfumed, and pow^dered ; 
and then sallied forth for a stroll through the Mer- 
ceria, where this excellent husband and father made 
tasteful purchases to be carried to the lady he served. 
At dinner, which he took about seven or eight, his 
board w^as covered with the most tempting viands, 



394 VENETIAN LIFE. 

and surrounded by needy parasites, who detailed the 
spicy scandals of the day in payment of their dinner, 
while the children of the host were confided to the 
care of the corrupt and negligent servants. After 
dinner, the father went to the theatre, or to the 
casino, and spent the night over cards and wine, in 
the society of dissolute women ; and renewed on the 
morrow the routine of his useful existence. The 
education of the children of the man of fashion was 
confided to a priest, who lived in his family, and 
called himself an abbate, after the mode of the abbes 
of French society; he had winning manners with 
the ladies, indulgent habits with his pupils, and 
dressed his elegant person in silks of Lyons and Eng- 
lish broadcloths. In the pleasant old days he flitted 
from palace to villa, dining and supping, and flattering 
the ladies, and tapping the lid of his jeweled snuff- 
box in all fashionable companies. He was the cadet 
of a patrician family (when not the ambitious son of 
a low family), with a polite taste for idleness and 
intrigue, for whom no secular sinecure could be found 
in the State, and who obliged the Church by accept- 
ing orders. Whether in the palace on the Grand 
Canal, or the villa on the Brenta, this gentle and en- 
gaging priest was surely the most agreeable person 
to be met, and the most dangerous to ladies' hearts, — 
with his rich suit of black, and his smug, clean-shaven 
face, and his jeweled hands, and his sweet, seducing 
manners. Alas ! the world is changed ! The priests 
whom you see playing tre-sette now at the conversa- 
zioni are altogether different men, and the delightful 



SOCIETY. 395 

abbate is as much out of fashion as the bag- wig or 
the queue. When in fashion he loved the theatre, 
and often showed himself there at the side of his 
noble patron's wife. Nay, in that time the theatre 
was so prized by the Church that a popular preacher 
thought it becoming to declare from his pulpit that 
to compose well his hearers should study the come- 
dies of Goldoni, — and his hearers were the posterity 
of that devout old aristocracy which never undertook 
a journey without first receiving the holy sacrament ; 
which had built the churches and endowed them from 
private wealth ! 

Ignorance, as well as vice, was the mode in those 
elegant days, and it is related that a charming lady 
of good society once addressed a foreign savant at 
her conversazione, and begged him to favor the com- 
pany with a little music, because, having heard that 
he was virtuous^ she had no other association with 
the word than its technical use in Itaty to indicate 
a professional singer as a virtuoso, A father of a 
family who kept no abbate for the education of his 
children ingeniously taught them himself. " Father," 
asked one of his children, '' what are the stars ? " 
'' The stars are stars, and little things that shine as 
thou seest." '^ Then they are candles, perhaps ? '^ 
" Make thy account that they are candles exactly.'* 
" Of wax or tallow ? " pursues the boy. '' What ! 
tallow-candles in heaven ? No, certainly — wax, 
wax ! " 

These, and many other scandalous stories, the 
Venetian writers recount of the last days of their 



396 VENETIAN LIFE. 

Republic, and the picture tliey produce is one of the 
most shameless ignorance, the most polite corruption, 
the most unblushino; baseness. I have no doubt that 
the picture is full of national exaggeration. Indeed, 
the method of Mutinelli (who I believe intends to 
tell the truth) in writing social history is altogether 
too credulous and incautious. It is well enough 
to study contemporary comedy for light upon past 
society, but satirical baHads and lampoons, and scur- 
rilous letters, cannot be accepted as historical au- 
thority. Still there is no question but Venice was 
very corrupt. As you read of her people in the 
last century, one by one the ideas of family faith and 
domestic purity fade away ; one by one the beliefs 
in public virtue are dissipated ; until at last you are 
glad to fly the study, close the filthy pages, and take 
refuge in doubt of the w^riters, who declare that they 
must needs disgrace Venice with facts since her 
children have dishonored her in their lives. " Such 
as we see them," they say, " were the patricians, 
such the people of Venice, after the middle of the 
eighteenth century. The Venetians might be con- 
sidered as extinguished ; the marvelous city, the 
pomp only of the Venetians, existed." 

Shall we believe this ? Let each choose for him- 
self. At that very time the taste and wealth of 
a Venetian noble fostered the genius of Canova ; 
and then, when their captains starved the ragged 
soldiers of the Republic to feed their own idleness 
and vice, — when the soldiers dismantled her forts to 
sell the guns to the Turk, — when her sailors rioted 



SOCIETY. 397 

on shore and her ships rotted in her ports, she had 
still mihtary virtue enough to produce that Emo, 
who beat back the Algerine corsairs from the com- 
merce of Christendom, and attacked them in their 
stronghold, as of old her galleys beat back the Turks. 
Alas ! there was not the virtue in her statesmen to 
respond to this greatness in the hero. One of their 
last public acts was to break his heart with insult, 
and to crave peace of the pirates whom he had 
cowed. It remained for the helpless Doge and the 
abject patricians, terrified at a threat of war, to de- 
clare the Republic at an end, and San Marco was 
no more. 

I love Republics too well to lament the fall of 
Venice. And yet, Pax tihi^ Marce ! If I have been 
slow to praise, I shall not hasten to condemn, a whole 
nation. Indeed, so much occurs to me to qualify 
with contrary sense what I have written concerning 
Venice, that* I wonder if, after all, I have not been 
treatinoi: throuo-hout less of the rule than of the ex- 
ception. It is a doubt which must force itself upon 
every fair and temperate man who attempts to de- 
scribe another people's life and character ; and I 
confess that it troubles me so sorely now, at the end 
of my work, that I would fain pray the gentle reader 
to believe much more good and much less evil of the 
Venetians than I have said. I am glad that it remains 
for me to express a faith and hope in them for the 
future, founded upon their present political feeling, 
which, hoT^ ever tainted with self-interest in the case 
of many, is no doubt with the great majority a high 



398 VENETIAN LIFE. 

and true feeling of patriotism. And it is impossible 
to believe that a people which can maintain the 
stern and unyielding attitude now maintained by 
the Venetians toward an alien government disposed 
to make them any concession short of freedom, in 
order to win them into voluntary submission, can be 
wanting in the great qualities which distinguish living 
peoples from those passed hopelessly into history and 
sentiment. In truth, glancing back over the whole 
career of the nation, I can discern in it nothing so 
admirable, so dignified, so steadfastly brave, as its 
present sacrifice of all that makes life easy and joy- 
ous, to the attainment of a good which shall make 
life noble. 

The Venetians desire now, and first of all things, 
Liberty, knowing that in slavery men can learn no 
virtues ; and I think them fit, with all their errors 
and defects, to be free now, because men are never 
fit to be slaves. 



INDEX. 



Abbati, The, 394, 395. 
Alexander IK., Fope, 273. 
Annual State Banquets, 275. 
Armenian College, 202 to 205. 
Armenian Literati and Literature, 

177 to 200. 
Attila's Chair, 184. 
Aus^ustinian Convent, Court of the, 

166. 

Baptisms, Patrician, 320, 321. 

Barbarossa, 273. 

Bembo, Cardinal, 181; his palace, 

208. 
Benedict III., Pope, 272. 
Betrothals, Plebeian, 307, 308. 
Bianca Cappello's house, 235. 
Bonnet of the Doge, 272. 
Brides, Rape of the Venetian, 307. 
Bridge of Sighs, 12. 
Bucintoro, The, 277, 278. 
Burattini, 75, 76. 
Burial-ground at San Michele, 322 

to 327; of the Jews on Lido, 175. 
Byron, 176, 195 ; his house, 235. 
Byzantine fashions and influence, 

359. 

Campi, The, 64. 

Canova, 396. 

Capuchins, Order of, founded, 191; 

banished, 226. 
Carmelites, Church of the, 162. 
Carnival, 15, 22, 126. 
Carraras, The, 15, 167. 
Casa di Ricovero, 160. 
Castellani and Nicolotti, 280. 
Castle of Love, 261. 
Chioggia, 188, 189; costume in, 

190. 
Chiozzotti, Famous, 190 to 192. 
Christmas, 303; presents, 296, 297; 

fairs, 298; masses, 300 to 303. 



Clement V., Pope, 224. 

Clock Tower, 55 ; Magi of the, 289. 

Comitato Veneto, 19, 20. 

Commedia a braccio, 78, 79. 

Commerce, 237; with the Goths, 
238 ; with the Longobards, 239 ; in 
slaves, 240 : with the Franks, 241 ; 
in the Greek Empire, 241; with 
the East, 243 ; amount of, past 
and present, 248 ; in relics, 253 ; 
decline of, 253; fall of, in the 
Orient, 254. 

Corpus Christi, 284 to 288. 

Dandolo, Enrico, 138, 241. 
Doria, Andrea, 127, 276. 
Ducal Palace, 13, 55. 
Ducal State Visits, 272 to 274. 

Emo, 397. 

Ernest, Duke of Brunswick, 269. 
Espousals of the Sea, 277 to 280. 
Excommunication of Ferrara, 224, 
225. 

Falier, Marin, 14, 15, 100, 101, 283. 
Fenice Theatre, 70. 
Fish Market, 330. 
Florian, Caffe, 23, 58, 141. 
Foscari, Jacopo, 15; his marriage, 

310 to 312. 
Fresco, The, 133. 
Funeral rites, ancient and modern, 

322. 

Gardens, The Public, 292; Mon- 
days at the, 293. 
Ghetto, The, 211 to 218. 
Giant Sea-wall, The, 188. 
Giant's Stairs, 15. 
Giudecca, Island of the, 174. 
Goldoni, 78, 189, 336 ; house of, 234. 
GondoHers, 328 to 337. 



400 



INDEX. 



Grand Canal, 28, 47, 95, 127, 266 

to 270. 
Grand Council, 392. 
Gregory XYI., Pope, 322. 

Hatred of Austria, 16 to 23. 

Ice, Year of the, 49, 50. 
Illustrissimo, 359. 
Inquisition^ 381. 
Interdict of 1606, 224 to 229. 

Jesuits, Church of the, 46; ban- 
ished, 226 ; influence of, 378. 

Jews, Exile and former disabilities 
of, 210 to 213; Cemetery of the, 
217. 

Law, Tomb of John, 301. 
Lepanto, Fight of, celebrated, 264. 
Lido, Island of the, 175 to 178. 
Luther, 167. 

Malamocco, 170, 179, 264. 

Malibran Theatre, 73, 74. 

Manin, Daniele, 374. 

Marco e Todaro, 53. 

Marie, Festa delle, 276. 

Marionette Theatre, 74 to 83. 

Marriage customs, Early, 306 ; Cere- 
monies, Modern, 319; Patrician, 
308 to 310. 

Mastino della Scala, 264. 

Mechithar, 194. 

Merceria, 298. 

Michiel, The Doge Domenico, 274; 
Guistina Renier-]\Tichiel, 277. 

Mocenigo, Tommaso, 248. 

Molo, 55. 

Monte de Pieta, 117. 

Murano, 180 to 182; 244, 248. 

Musical Conservatories, 72, 73. 

New Year's Day, 304, 305. 
Nobles, 21, 381 to 387. 

Othello's house, 328. 
Otho, The Emperor, 241. 

Palaces, 390, 391. 
Palestrina, 191. 
Paul, v., Pope, 225. 
Pepin, King, 264. 

Petrarch, 126 ; his account of a joust 
in the Piazza, 262, 263. 



Piazza and Caffe, 54, 56 to 60, 126, 

141, 284. 
Piazzetta, 55. 
Pigeons of St. Mark, 282. 
Pigs of St. Anthony, 38L 
Pisani, Vittore, 15. 
Polo, Marco, 243. 
Povegliesi, The, 281. 
Tozzi, The, 13. 
Priests, 376 to 379. 
Prisons, The Criminal, 13. 
Procuratie, 55. 

Redentore, Festa del, 174, 274, 275. 
Regattas, The, 265 to 269. 
Rialto, 91; market, 143. 
Riva degli Schiavoni, 55, 68, 290. 

Salviati, Mosaic establishment of, 

250 to 253. 
San Bartolomeo, Campo, 64 to 68. 
San Clemente, Island of, 173. 
San Geminiano, Removal of the 

Church of, 271,272. 
San Giorgio Maggiore, Church of, 

175. 
San Giovanni e Paolo, Church of, 

164, 165. 
San Lazzaro, Convent of, 48, 194. 
San Moise, Church of, 300. 
San Nicolo dei Tolentini, Church 

of, 163. 
San Pietro di Castello, 275, 284, 

285, 306. 
San Rocco, Scuola di, 321; theft 

of body of, 274. 
San Stefano, Church of, 166 ; Day 

of, 304, 305. 
Santa Maria del Giglio, Church of, 

140, 141. 
Santa Maria dell' Orto Church of, 

213. 
Santa Maria della Salute, Church 

of, 160, 163, 164, 274, 275. 
Santa Maria Fermosa, Church of, 

276. 
San Zaccaria, Church of, 272 ; con- 
vent of, 381. 
Sarpi, Paolo, 219 to 230. 
Servite Convent, 220. 
Sforza, Francesco, 311. 
Sior Antonio Rioba, 212. 
Soldini Masses, 160. 
Sottomarina, 192. 
Spanish Synagogue, 215. 



INDEX 401 

Specchi, Caffd, 60. Titian, House of, 232 to 234. 

St. Mark, Church of, 20, 52, 56, 157 Torcello, 183 to 188. 

to 160, 331; Body of, 270, 272. Tradonico, Pietro, The Doge, 273. 
Suttil, Caff^, 60. 

Ulrich, Patriarch of Aquileja, 259. 

T^/jIYi p-pl o IIP Q^^ 

Tana, Colony of, 243; Fall of, 255. Villa Pisani at Stra, 388. 

Theodoric, King of the Goths, 238. Villas. 386 ; on the Brenta, 387, 388. 
Tiepolo, Bajamonte, 265, 283. 

Tintoretto, Tomb of, 213, 214 ; House Zeno, Carlo, 15. 

of, 231. Ziani, The Doge, 262, 278. 



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